


snake eyed, with a slight smile

by prolix



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Canon Related, Holoforms (Transformers), It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, LGBTQ Themes, Multi, Other, Trans Characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2019-05-20 00:25:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14884098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prolix/pseuds/prolix
Summary: (Whirl buries the baseball bat near the tree-line behind the baseball diamond. There’s a huge crack splitting it down the middle. He gives it a proper funeral, covering the upturned dirt with the clumps of lawn he’d dug up, dirty fingers flicking a half-salute as Whirl turns away from the scene and exits pursued by the sound of the alarm.“The fuck did you do?” Impactor asks him out in front of the convenience store Whirl bums cigarettes from. He lifts a stolen camo bic to a fresh one and waits a second for it to catch. Then he slowly pulls it from his lips, cocks his head, and says with all the slow, deliberatefuck youhe can, “No idea what you’re talking about, chief.”)





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> 'really can't ever imagine myself writing a human au for transformers,' i said to myself, typing this out at four in the morning because i'm a sucker for this particular brand of bullshit. 'can't see the appeal, personally. don't think transformers fits that kind of au. nah.'  
> anyway happy pride
> 
> muse(ic) is: natural disaster by mike krol  
> title from black mambo by glass animals  
> enjoy, and i love you!  
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label (part one) : reoccurring mentions of suicidal ideation and self-destructive behavior, depression, physical abuse, alcohol abuse, violence (specifically between impactor and whirl and fort max and whirl, but also generally), references to transphobia/misgendering, and themes of struggling with and working through trauma

 

**i**

 

x

 

Whirl fumbles with the lighter in his pocket, focused on keeping his fingers steady enough to hold the pall mall between them. 

“Fuck, okay, could you give me a light?” he asks, and gestures.

Chromedome shoves himself far enough off the wall he leans against to shuffle through the back pocket of his jeans, and offers him a rainbow-colored bic. Whirl gives him an odd look but slots the cigarette between his teeth and leans down to catch the spark off the mouth of it. Chromedome shrugs, draws out a tiny flame expertly on the first flick, and pockets it again. They stay like that for a long time, watching the stoplights strung above them without really paying attention, as they turn red-yellow-green in time to traffic that doesn’t exist at this time of night. 

Chromedome checks his phone once or twice, then waves down a tiny, dinky-looking Prius stopped at the intersection. As it pulls up, ostensibly his ride, he looks back at Whirl.

“Hey, by the way, just out of curiosity - do you even go here?”

Whirl smiles, spits out the last half of his cigarette, crushes it with a boot, and walks back the way they had come.

 

x

 

He doesn’t think he’s that bad a guy, at first. 

These are the bad old days, when he used to call himself something else - something longer, a little nicer, maybe.

He likes getting into clubs he’s too young for - the air’s different in those places, it smells and sounds and tastes like  _ people.  _ It’s people-watching piped through an amp; everyone’s trying so hard, to signal the bartender, to flirt with the catch of the night, to look cool and sound cool and order the coolest drinks, dance to the coolest music or be too cool to dance to the coolest music. Whirl likes it because it’s not a place his family or the cops would ever look for him -  _ Polyhexxx,  _ the town’s only gay bar. It’s crowded enough for him to avoid attention from the patrons, who mistake him for staff or the token straight scoping out the scene or something, but not so much that he’d have to fight to get to the fire exit at the back. 

Later he’ll hang out down by the park, spends the first few weeks worried he looks like a fucking pedophile skulking around the playground. He curls up in the middle of the tube slide, bums cigarettes down by the convenience store and lights them with a candle lighter on top of the monkey bars. Everything’s very still when you’re the king of the playground. Everything’s very still for a kingdom of one.

After a while, though, it gets worse - he can’t stay in one spot for long, so he bounces between places - the wash, dark alleyways, bad bars, worse bars, a cell. He does a two-day stint for a misunderstanding that wasn’t in the county jail. Jail’s only got one cell, of course, this being a small town, one cell and two or three cops on duty at a time. So Whirl, sprawled out on the metal bench riveted to the wall, doesn’t expect it when the door to it is opened again and the other officer on duty steps in _.  _ Everything’s still for a kingdom of one, remember.

This is the first time he meets Impactor. 

 

x

 

(Impactor’s bred to be a bastard - mean in the core of him, like some sort of fucked up fighting dog. But he’s lucid, clear-eyed about what he’s doing. He knows he hurts people. Fighting dogs are afraid, vicious to survive. Impactor beats people senseless because it’s what he’s good at, and somewhere behind those lucid, clear eyes, he enjoys it, the thick black slide of it. 

This is the Polyhex limbo. How low can you go?)

 

x

 

(Whirl’s good at this. Whirl can go very, very low.)

 

x

 

He finds Rung on accident. 

Not actually on accident, but that’s what Whirl likes to say. He’s at that rough patch between thinking about putting a gun in his mouth and actually doing it, that zone where you start wondering about the afterlife and the possibility of an absence thereof, of shit like God or gods and the disapproving look on Saint Peter’s face or the metric tonnage of his immortal soul or whatever. 

But he figures after a while he’s given dying a fair amount of thought, and that he should probably get living’s argument in, too, before he commits to anything  _ fatal. _

Rung’s a student psychologist (and hopefully that’s his last name and not his first), not actually the real deal  _ bona fide _ , but close enough and a lot less expensive. Whirl hops between jobs like he does shady hangouts. 

“I’m thinking about offing myself, doc, got anything you can prescribe for that?” he says in their first session, picking at the laces of his shoes.

Rung crosses his legs - the guy’s wearing tweed slacks, like he’s a grandfather in a grad student’s body - and leans back in his chair. His thick glasses reflect all possible light, making them shiny twin mirrors of Whirl slumped over on the couch. He looks like an actor portrayal of someone who’s hit rock bottom in a rehab commercial.

“Not really. How often?”

“Hm?”

“How often do you think about that?”

Whirl tugs at one of his ponytails absently - it’s one of the only simple movements his hands can make anymore. 

(Fun fact: in order to win the Polyhex limbo, you’ve gotta give something up.  _ Sacrifice.  _ It either makes you stronger, or -

Well.)

“Couple times a day, I guess. Those yours?” Whirl asks, gesturing with an elbow to the balsa wood model ships placed at even intervals on the shelves of one wall. Some of them are painted, probably from those little pots of acrylic they come with, but others are finished with real, honest-to-god, wood stain.

“Yes. They’re a hobby. Are you doing it now?”   
“Thinking about killing myself? Oh,” Whirl waves as if to dismiss the thought, a smile that’s all teeth on his face, “If I told you that, it’d ruin the mystery, doc.”

Rung frowns, but seems to resolve to let it go. “Mm-hm. What do you do besides contemplate suicide? Do you have a job, go to school? Do you have a partner?”

Whirl shrugs. “Not really any of the above. I keep myself entertained, for the most part.”

That catches with Rung, because he leans forward just enough for those fucking Coke-bottle glasses to slide forward enough for Whirl to get a peak at his eyes.

“What would you like to do?”

 

x

 

It’s late November, maybe. There’s no snow outside yet, but there’s a thin crust of sleet in the mornings for him to break apart with his boots on the way to school. He’s got his hands in his pockets because of the chill, maybe.

He leans back in his seat that day, keeps his jacket on and his forearms below the lip of his desk. The pen he normally twirls while everyone talks around him is stuffed at the bottom of his bag. He takes off at lunch to sit outside on one of the picnic benches, laid all the way back with his head hanging out over the end, ponytail brushing the ground. He keeps to himself except to pop his bubblegum with his teeth.

The next day he doesn’t show up. 

A week later he walks in missing an eye. 

 

x

 

(Depth perception is one of those things, like good looks or a smart mouth, that Whirl hates to see wasted on shitty people. Impactor is one of those people. 

Whirl’s tall, but Impactor’s taller, and very much wider, and within seconds of landing the first blow that snaps his head to the side and slices his tongue open with a canine he puts his face in Whirl’s blind spot. Even with his instinct to move his head to keep him in sight, it’s difficult to judge how far away a target relatively small in comparison to his body is. In fist fights it’s not all about the face, but it’s still about 80-85%. 

His immediate thought is  _ oh fuck, oh my God he’s gonna kill me.  _

But Impactor hits him again, and again, and when Whirl lands a solid kick to the side of his knee, bringing him down a bit, Impactor just grunts and tries to grab his hair, saying nothing. 

And Whirl starts laughing.)

(Impactor’s one of those people who likes to hurt other people. Thick black slide. But that’s how he likes it - fist fights, brutalization, beating the shit out of people until they don’t fight back anymore. For a vicious, sick son of a bitch, that’s pretty straightforward. 

That’s even something Whirl can get behind.

He was expecting much worse.)

 

x

 

Whirl’s only ever lost two fights. 

Once, to Impactor.

And once, to some motherfucker calling himself ‘Killmaster’.

 

x

 

“Hey, I haven’t seen you around - do you go here?”

Whirl bites out a shark-toothed smile and brushes by to get another drink.

No one had actually invited him - he’d been around campus for a session with Rung that got postponed, and while waiting around looking like a dumbass outside the health center, had his attention caught by two grad students walking toward the underpass that bisected the smaller of the two greens. It was a notoriously good place to set up meetings with your dealer, but somehow the obscenely tall person in a dark purple duster and the five-foot-nothing cutie with the thigh-highs didn’t seem like the type. 

_ Huh,  _ he thought. 

Which is how he found himself hanging out with the Down Low club - more or less the friend circle of one guy in particular, a rising junior with the makings of being class president despite being a massive asshole. Or maybe because of. 

As far as parties go, it wasn’t roaring - it probably started out more as a get-together before term started to drink sodas spiked with cheap vodka, but plus-ones became plus-fives, and when Whirl arrived there were somehow fifty or so people packed beneath this overpass. Duster and thigh-highs had camped out in one corner, sharing a blanket spread out on the grass. Whirl for a brief second of terror thought he spotted Rung (“ _ postponed”, you liar)  _ and ducked over to the other side of the crowd before he could be caught.

Which put him next to literally the drunkest person in the world and the guy in charge of making the drinks and for screaming  _ scatter!  _ If the cops showed up.

They were cute, if not incredibly sloshed for 9 pm on a Wednesday. They were half-dangling from the shoulder of a lanky, arts-major looking person, almost as tall as Whirl, which was impressive. He caught the tail end of what they were saying as he cleared the crowd into wallflower territory. 

“ - It’s like he’s  _ not even there,  _ D! What am I supposed to  _ do,  _ hang off his arm or something?”

The taller person, D, looked down at their person-leech and just cocked their head in silence.

“You - oh, you know what I mean. It’s not a  _ bad _ idea, I suppose…” 

They turned a little to hard, probably to ask the person on bartender duty for a refill, when they spotted Whirl and  _ locked on.  _ They had big bright grey-green eyes and thick eyelashes and freckles and they were wearing the  _ tackiest  _ wrinkled button-up Whirl had ever seen, paired with equally-disheveled slacks, like some kind of frankensteinian fusion of business casual and  _ Doctor Who.  _

_ Oh.  _

“Oh hi! You’re, uh, new. Haven’t seen you around.  _ Listen  _ I need someone to take my side on this because Domey’s being mopey without his boyfriend around - “

“Fuck off, I am not. Who - “

“And I’m having a  _ crisis of character,  _ okay? So look, it’s like this - “

Whirl gestured toward the person filling a Dixie cup with Absolut and got a nod. Free liquor is free liquor.

“ - internship researching Hawking radiation with  _ the  _ hottest partner, like, apex hot. If he was a number he’d be a ten, which, come to think of it, makes sense because he’s so fucking  _ rational _ \- “

Whirl took what was handed to him gratefully and downed it in one. The person chattering at him blinked once at him, then at his empty cup, then kept going (“But the  _ issue  _ is, okay, that he’s completely oblivious to this. I’ve tried everything!”)

_ Is this how college parties are? This sucks - I thought there’d be at least one fight and like, less awkward making out. _

They ramble for a solid five minutes, barely stopping to breathe - which is totally fine with Whirl, free entertainment is one thing, but he way they move their hands when they talk is entirely separate, and the kinetic glee in their eyes as they talk about the  _ Applications capital A  _ of black hole theory is almost sexy if not incredibly nerdy - before the person they were talking to before appears at their shoulder. 

“Hey, Rewind’s here, I’m gonna spend the night at his. Nautica’s gonna walk you home, okay?” Behind that mess of fringe, Whirl spots him dart his eyes up to look square at him. “And keep your phone on you - call me when you’re back.”

Whirl’s small drunk new friend simply waves him off like he can’t be bothered. “Yeah, of course. See you later. Have good sex or whatever.”

Their friend recoils, almost looking hurt, before schooling the expression expertly and turning to leave. 

“ _ As  _ I was saying - “

Whirl snags the drink out of the hand of someone passing by, and either he’s smoother than he thought or they’re completely wasted, but he gets away with it cleanly. He eyes the amount of bubbles floating near the sides and swigs it.

“Do you live here? Like in a dorm?” He asks.

They stop, blinking those big sharp eyes. “Do I - What?”

Whirl rolls his eye. “You live on campus or not?”

“W - Y-Yeah, I used to share a room with Chromedome but they haven’t really assigned anybody to me yet.”

Whirl smiles, deep and wide, and finishes the rest of his stolen drink. 

“Wanna go there?”

 

x

 

Whirl eats them out -  _ “Brainstorm”  _ they’d introduced themselves at the threshold, fumbling with their key through shivers,  _ “It’s a nickname, it’s what all my friends call me” _ \- on a rock-solid mattress without sheets -  _ “Too, ah, busy, sorry... “  _ \- their awful shirt halfway unbuttoned, Whirl still fully dressed. They’re  _ loud  _ and responsive to every single thing and they buck their hips just a little too much, enough for Whirl to bite his own lip and draw blood, but it’s good. The way they turn their head away is good. The peak of the band of their binder under their shirt he gets every time they arch their back is good.

They offer to reciprocate, of course. Flat on their back with Whirl straightening up on his knees between their legs, three for three and out of breath.

_ “I - I could… I’ve never tr - “  _

“Nah,” he says, “it’s fine,” and flops face-first into the bed. After a second, trusting Brainstorm is sufficiently occupied, Whirl slips a hand into the pocket of their slacks pinned under his stomach, draws something from the back pocket, huffs a laugh, and rolls over to fall asleep. 

In the morning after Brainstorm leaves to meet with his interning group, Whirl shakes his head and pulls his boots back on. 

Kid’s name is  _ Genitus,  _ the poor fucker.

 

x

 

Whirl’s senior prank is this:

He steals the baseball bat from Springer’s backyard. Springer’s a good guy, overall, as much as you can be when you know Impactor. Impactor’s a big brother type when he’s not brutalizing jailbirds, and with Springer he’s an uneasy mentor. Whirl fits into Impactor’s social circle well, all older than him, burly, know their way around a shotgun, but Springer’s a golden child, popular at school, well-liked. He almost feels bad looking at the initials carved into the endcap. Almost.

It’s around 4 am when Whirl walks through the parking lot, up to the very front of the building. Two big glass doors, flanked by two windows, two more up higher on the second floor. A lightpole out in front. Whirl tests his grip on the handle of the bat. His hands remember how to hold it, this they can do.

For a moment, before he starts, everything is still. It’s early morning, clear but cold. And it’s silent. A kingdom of one. Whirl’s teeth click and the bubble he’s blown snaps.

By the end of it, the fire alarms are screaming, the light pole almost bent in half, glass from the bulb in a pool across the sidewalk, the two doors and their adjacent windows smashed in, and over the frame of what jagged teeth remain of them, in bright fuck-off blue, is:

_ WRECK + RULE _

 

x

 

(Whirl buries the baseball bat near the tree-line behind the baseball diamond. There’s a huge crack splitting it down the middle. He gives it a proper funeral, covering the upturned dirt with the clumps of lawn he’d dug up, dirty fingers flicking a half-salute as Whirl turns away from the scene and exits pursued by the sound of the alarm. 

“The fuck did you do?” Impactor asks him out in front of the convenience store Whirl bums cigarettes from. He lifts a stolen camo bic to a fresh pall mall and waits a second for it to catch. Then he slowly pulls it from his lips, cocks his head, and says with all the slow, deliberate  _ fuck you  _ he can, “No idea what you’re talking about, chief.”)

 

x

 

(The Polyhex limbo. How low does the bar go? How far can you go before you can’t stand back up? How do you know when you’ve won? How do you  _ stop? _ )

 

x

 

“So when’s this all supposed to work?”

Rung runs the lenses of his glasses across his cardigan - a  _ cardigan _ , like he’s Mister fucking  _ Rogers  _ \- and looks at him quizzically. “What do you mean?”

Whirl flops backwards on the couch. “The whole  _ psychoanalysis  _ thing. When’s it gonna click? Do I have to like, save a kid from a burning building after a moment of tense internal deliberation? Jump into a river after a puppy? Have a heartfelt reunion with my father where we confess to each other our sins and our ultimate familial love for each other?”   
“Do you want to do any of those things?” Rung asks.

“You’re full of shit.”

“I can only help you as much as you’re willing to be helped, Whirl. If you feel like this isn’t working, that may be accurate, but I think you’d benefit from asking yourself why we aren’t moving forward, too.”

“Fucking  _ Christ _ , can’t you just, like, hit me with some biting insight into my psyche that shames me from my wayward life of crime or something?” Whirl reaches up to start braiding one of his pigtails, stops, then instead pulls the hair band out and begins re-tying it.

“I  _ can,  _ I just don’t think it would stop you from petty theft and property damage.”

“You got me, doc. I’m incorrigible.”

“Why don’t you apply here?”

Whirl stops tying, letting the band snap back around his wrist. After a pause, he starts again, quicker this time, and secures it a little too tight against his scalp.

“What, to college? Like I could get in?”

“You have your GED, correct? And if I volunteered a letter of recommendation addressing your criminal record and your progress here, as well as your motivation to improve, that may help.”

Whirl stares at him for a long time. Then, after a minute or two, he stands, grabs his jacket, slinging it over his shoulders, and walks out.

He walks to the center of campus, then further up the main slope of the hill past the larger green to the student union at the top. He sits there for hours on the banister of the main steps, drumming his fingers against his knee. He’s about to get up and leave when he notices who’s walking up the hill toward him - the two from the night of the party, comically tall and comically small. The tall one is wearing a charcoal blazer and a deep purple undershirt, and the tiny one has on baby blue denim overalls over a t-shirt that says something Whirl can’t make out.

For some reason a shudder of sudden panic strikes him, and he scrambles to give his hands something to do. Almost instinctively they go to his jacket pockets, pulling out a pack of oranges and a bic. This one’s got little smiley faces all over it.

It sparks on the first flick, just as the two are passing by. 

“Those things will kill you,” the tiny one says, turning half away from his companion to frown at Whirl, “You know that, right?”

“Leave it,” the taller one says quietly, almost so low Whirl’s unsure he’s heard it.

He blinks, then in a heartbeat lets out a dry laugh - his voice sounds the way smoke tastes. 

“No worries, squirt - I won’t live long enough for these things to do the job, anyway.”

And they walk away from each other.

_ Huh.  _

 

x

 

He gets a text later that week curled up in bed - it’s the middle of the day, but he’s between jobs, and there’s nothing else to do besides lay down long enough to trick his body into sleeping.

_ It’s Brainstorm. Hope you don’t mind I put my number in your phone while you were sneaking a look at my student id _

_ ;) _

Whirl laughs, flicking open his messages and waiting.

_ Party tonight over at my friend’s place, and Perceptor’s gonna be there. Want to come with to make him jealous? _

Whirl waits.

_ Free booze.  _

 

x

 

_ (Free booze.  _

Those were the days, huh? More than he could drink, and none of it legal for him to have. On days he wanted to get drunk, or even just to feel the pain of liquor sliding down his throat, tearing a hole in his stomach, he’d go to the dive bars downtown. At the gay bar a few blocks over no one paid attention to him - here everyone did, just not the right  _ kind  _ of attention. He’d get neat little glasses slid over to him, paid for by patrons, bartenders. Most of the time it was whatever he was already having, but sometimes it’d be a shirley temple or a cocktail that took six minutes and fourteen different ingredients to make. He’d leave those on the bare, drink the rest, and then leave. After a while it stopped being funny. That was around the time he let his bangs grow out over his missing eye so he could tuck it behind his ear. He got fewer drinks, then stopped showing up altogether.)

(He met Impactor two weeks after that.)

 

x

 

Whirl meets Brainstorm a block away from the apartment. They’re still cute in a messy, unkempt kind of way - warm dark skin and bleached natural hair cut short, a sweater over their button-up, and lived-in jeans. Whirl frowns at them - they keep shuffling their hands to different pockets: both in front then one in back then both in back then both in front then one in front.

“Hi, glad you made it.”

Whirl shrugs. “No reason not to - free liquor. So what’s your game plan? I can stand there and look pretty, or break some shit and cause a scene.”

Brainstorm’s eyes widen, “You would? I mean! I think, just normal stuff, hang around and talk to me and… normal stuff. That’s normal, right?”

Whirl tilts his head. “Have you actually ever been in a relationship before?”

Brainstorm crosses their arms and turns to walk away from him. “Have  _ you?”  _

Whirl tucks his hands into his pockets and follows. “You get all dressed up for the occasion, too?” He says, and bites the corner of his lip.

“Fuck off,” Brainstorm hisses. 

The party’s much more involved than the one at the overpass - multi-colored lights and some sort of electropop band playing through the surround sound, a kitchen island decked out with six or seven different types of liquor as a makeshift bar. Brainstorm immediately moves around the outside of the crowd to try to find Chromedome, and Whirl just keeps close enough to make it look purposeful. 

They find him leaned against a wall, watching a foosball match showdown between someone wearing a red denim vest and skinny jeans and someone with a long brown ponytail and a purple blouse. 

“No Rewind?”

Chromedome shakes his head and glances into his drink. “He’s giving Swerve a ride here, had to go out of his way. Shouldn’t be too long though. Nautica’s really cleaning house, I don’t think anyone’s beaten her yet.” Chromedome catches sight of Whirl behind Brainstorm and pulls a face for a fraction of a second before it’s gone again. “Anyway, tonight’s the big night, then? Gonna pull Percy aside and serenade him?”

_ Percy and Genitus,  _ Whirl thinks,  _ Jesus Christ it’s like they were made for each other in nerdy, nerdy heaven.  _

“Nah, they’re gonna hang on my arm all night making doe eyes and working up the courage,” He interjects. Brainstorm looks at him, hurt, but then looks away. He should feel bad, but really all he wants to do is laugh. He shouldn’t have come. 

“Then at least you have a purpose here, I guess.” Chromedome says, and it comes out scalpel sharp, but his expression never changes. Whirl chews on the inside of his cheek, but can’t find anything to say to that so he laughs instead. 

He peels away a minute later to get a drink from the counter. As he moves to grab a bottle of jack and coke from the ice, he spots Rung coming around the corner, leaving the kitchen. Next to him is someone Whirl’s never seen before, talking with big, excited gestures. They’re around Brainstorm’s height, but not as painfully skinny as his sort-of-date. He’s also wearing some kind of awful blue houndstooth blazer over a yellow sweater. Whirl makes a point of cracking the bottle sharp and loud, keeping his eye on Rung as the therapist turns toward the sound and catches him looking. Whirl grins raptor-like as he goes immediately bright red and leaves before his date can react. 

As he does he stumbles into something massive and solid directly behind him, instinctively moving away a few steps and scowling. “Fuck, watch - “

“I’m sorry,” says the voice belonging to this wall of a person, and they pivot in the way normal people do when they bump into each other, as if to brace themselves to catch falling objects or steady the other person. “I didn’t - “   
They cut themself off abruptly, and Whirl can’t stand at this exact moment to look them in the face and know why - if it’s the hands or the eye or a combination of the two, so he mutters something noncommittal and tightens his grip on the neck of the bottle, and keeps pushing through. He bites down on his tongue, and realizes it tastes like cold metal. 

Chromedome’s still watching foosball when Whirl gets back, but Brainstorm’s nowhere in sight. 

He gestures, “They got anxious, went to go get some air. I’m waiting to see if Percy follows them out before I go check on them.”

“Quick,” Whirl grunts, downing half his bottle at once. 

Chromedome side-eyes him. “Hm. What’s your story, anyway?”

“Oh, me?” Whirl asks, blinking big facetious doe eyes at him. It gets him a genuine scowl, and he smiles. “You guys always seem to have free booze, and I get bored easy.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Chromedome says, “I - “

“Hey, you know the big motherfucker back there?” Whirl interrupts, chucking a thumb behind him, “Got a voice like a fucking church bell?”

Chromedome narrows his eyes at him, but looks. “The really tall one in the blue? That’s Fort Max. He’s ROTC, plays some kind of sport, I think. Really invested in the humane society, too.”

_ Fort Max,  _ Whirl mouths. “Jesus Christ.”

Chromedome glances to the side and goes “Huh. Guess Percy’s the one doing the serenading tonight. Who would’ve figured.”

On the tail of his words, almost swallowing them with its intensity, is a savage, throat-tearing shriek of  _ “MAX!”  _ and then a firework of scattered yells and glass shattering.

Whirl turns a second too late - halfway through it an absolute  _ paw  _ of a hand comes down on his shoulder, the bones beneath compressing and flexing, and he’s yanked the rest of the way around.

_ Fuck. _

Max takes a step forward and launches Whirl across half the living room floor. The back of his throat fills up with the taste of blood as his head strikes something hard - the leg of a chair, maybe - and he fights the black spots in the corner of his vision back, immediately tilting his head to keep his bad eye down. As he does, Max closes the distance between them and pulls an arm back, the other reaching to haul him up from the floor. 

“Max, enough! That’s enough!”

Whirl blinks, less bewildered by the sudden attack than by the fact that he knows that voice.

Rung moves a little too fast, obviously trying to keep Max distracted before he can deck Whirl, but all of that energy  _ redirects,  _ and the hand that had been outstretching toward him is suddenly grabbed by Max in a fist that dwarf’s Rung’s entire arm and  _ yanked.  _ Something cracks audibly and before Whirl can think past the haze still clogging his ears, think beyond the heat-sense-pain memory of  _ Impactor,  _ or the words he’s babbling, he brings the arm he realizes is still holding his bottle up and smashes it against the back of Fort Max’s head.

“Jesus  _ Fuck,  _ that’s the best you got? If I knew you wanted to fight I’d at least have said something  _ offensive _ .”

Max releases Rung on impact, and even as he cradles his hand to his chest the therapist still manages to grate out a chastising “ _ Whirl…” _

He barks out something like a laugh that isn’t entirely there, part of it getting stuck in his throat. “Come on, doc, let the guy  _ express himself. _ ”

Whirl barely gets the words out before there’s a fist in his teeth. He kicks, hard, using the sudden burst of pain across his face to snap him back into place. He thrashes, kicking up, and the idea that  _ fucking hell this is exactly where I started  _ crosses his mind for a brief moment of lucidity before Max’s other fist comes down and it’s shattered like a million shards of glass.

“That’s it!” Whirl howls, and in one motion rolls away and gets up. His hands are shaky with adrenaline and he can feel his pulse in his  _ gums  _ but he’s delighted. Finally someone else who stands a reasonable goddamn chance of tearing him apart.

Whirl lashes out, aiming for the solar plexus, and in the corner of his eye can see Rung slowly moving back, getting clear. Max grabs his arm before it can land. 

And that’s when the cops show up. 

The front door bursts open, a siren piercing through the opening. Someone grabs one of the unopened bottle of Three Olives and smashes it onto the hardwood. The sound gives Whirl the distraction needed to book it for the back door, Chromedome seconds ahead of him. They eat up six blocks in the span of minutes, until the street signs become unfamiliar and the lightpoles less frequent. 

Chromedome kneels, breathing heavy, and collapses against the side of a building. Whirl stops in the middle of the street, no headlights in sight, turns back to him, and laughs so hard it comes out almost a scream, ripping through his throat, painful and mirthless. 

“Shut up! We’re not that far!” Chromedome hisses through deep, labored breaths. He pulls out his phone and immediately starts scrolling through saved contacts. Whirl walks back to him, leaning his head back against the cold brick, grinning big and bloody. He feels each of his teeth with his tongue and runs a hand across his mouth. It comes away pink-red with blood and spit.

“Storm, holy shit, are you okay?” Chromedome presses the receiver closer to his mouth with his other hand. He rocks back on his heels after a tense second. “Yeah, yeah, no we’re okay. Me and Whirl took off in the same direction. Just, uh, stay where you are, I’ll have Rewind come pick me up and then we’ll get you, okay?”

He does this three more times. Each time a little more of the immalleable tenseness falls away from his shoulders. 

Finally he dials a last number, and in the softest goddamn voice Whirl’s ever heard, goes “Rewind, baby.”

Whirl looks away.

“ - Okay, I’ll wait here. Yeah. I love you. I love you too. Bye.”

Chromedome puts his hands in his lap, phone held tightly between them both, and takes a long, slow breath.   
“Do you need a ride home?”

Whirl rolls his head over at him, surprised. The adrenaline’s starting to fizzle, like static after a radio transmission. His head feels like it’s been stuffed full of cotton, Build-A-Bear style, and there’s acid in his throat pushing into the back of his mouth that tastes like broken pennies and salt.

“Nah. I walked here, I can walk back.”

“That was, um.” He starts.

“It hurt like a fucking  _ bitch,”  _ Whirl spits, closing his eyes. 

“Yeah,” Chromedome whispers.

Half an hour later Whirl pulls out his box of pall malls.

 

x

 

(Here’s something Whirl is very, very good at:

Moving through being brought low. Crack his skull against the edge of a metal bench riveted to the wall, he grins through it and spits up blood as a thank you. Take half a bottle to his hands and he’ll use them to tie up his hair in the morning. Take another and he’ll destroy a chunk of his school building the next. He navigates through pain and anger, letting it congeal against his skin until it forms another slick layer of insulation, piling them on like blankets.

He never really learned that’s not a good thing.)

 

x

 

(“Is Whirl a nickname?” Rung asks.

He scoffs at the question. “No, my parents were just really pressed for names - too many Johns and Davids in the world, I guess. Yeah, doc, it’s a nickname.”   
Rung doesn’t seem phased by the barb - he isn’t phased by much. “Where’d you get it?”

He shrugs, as noncommittal as he can. “Don’t remember. S’something I’ve always had, I guess.”

Rung doesn’t bring it up again, apparently believing him.)

 

x

 

(On his way home, Whirl lights a second cigarette. 

The first horror is the horror. The second is accepting it.)

 


	2. ii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s a night in particular when Rung asks “What do you want to get out of this, Whirl? Besides alleviating suicidal ideation, what are you here for?” and he spends a good hour or two chewing on that afterward spread-eagle on the campus green, staring blankly upward. He wonders if he looks dead. Body floating on a sea of green, like a corpse in a swimming pool.
> 
> What would you like to do?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey!! thank you so much to everyone who's given feedback already, it's really cool that so many people enjoy whatever the fuck this is! so, i guess, have some more. 
> 
> muse(ic) is dreamers by k.flay  
> enjoy, and i love you!  
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label (part two) : reoccurring mentions of suicidal ideation and self-destructive behavior (including a failed suicide attempt), nicotine abuse, marijuana use, depression, gender dysphoria, violence (specifically between whirl and cyclonus but also general references to violence), discussions of mental health, and themes of struggling with and working through trauma

**ii**

 

x

 

After Impactor, he figured Polyhex had had enough of him; chewed him up and spit him out, the cosmic eviction notice he’d been unconsciously waiting for for a while now.  _ Get fucking lost. _

After Fort Max, he figured sort of the same. He didn’t see Brainstorm or Co. for a while, holed up in his one-bed one-bath or standing outside the club he bounced at.  _ Get fucking lost,  _ he knew how to respond to. He knew when a place was done with him. Rung called it ‘regrouping’ if he was feeling generous, ‘licking his wounds’ if he wasn’t. Whirl flipped him off either way. It was funny to see his compassionate, achingly sincere  _ I’m here for you, I’m your therapist  _ expression contort like something sour had stuck itself to his tongue. Out of a sense of self-preservation Whirl never asks who the guy Rung was with is - he’s starting to seriously think without Rung he might actually off himself, which scares him more than the idea of offing himself, maybe. He doesn’t actually have insurance  _ per se,  _ so getting all the different prescription drugs Rung keeps bringing up ( _ this  _ for depression,  _ this  _ for anxiety,  _ this  _ for ADHD,  _ this  _ for bipolar,  _ this  _ for fucking existing,  _ this  _ to keep yourself from waking up drenched in sweat ready to run three miles,  _ this  _ to go the fuck to sleep already and stay asleep,  _ this  _ to keep you from combusting because you’re drowning yourself in all the other pills) is a non-starter. So for now it’s Rung, and nicotine, and wandering around the block the nights he can’t sleep longer than half an hour at a time.

On one of those nights he walks to the edge of his neighborhood and stands underneath the underpass, listening to semis hauling cross-country trailers and cars commuting to and from the graveyard shift rattle the concrete tresses.

 

x

 

There’s a night in particular when Rung asks “What do you want to get out of this, Whirl? Besides alleviating suicidal ideation, what are you here for?” and he spends a good hour or two chewing on that afterward spread-eagle on the campus green, staring blankly upward. He wonders if he looks dead. Body floating on a sea of green, like a corpse in a swimming pool. 

_ What would you like to do? _

Huh.

 

x

 

(They asked him that in high school, once.  _ What do you want to do? Who do you want to be?  _ Like he was picking out a model in a car lot -  _ which one do you want? This one gets good miles per gallon, but ooh, this one’s got racing stripes! Choose wisely! _

They never asked if he’d wanted to not be a part of the system at all - drop out and make sporadic profit selling weed to college students, getting and ignoring free drinks from seedy hick bars, getting thrown out of the one minimum wage gig he manages to land because the two things on this earth he can’t stand are being called his legal name and  _ she _ , and no one in a place like Polyhex seems to get that, buying all of his necessities at the Dollar Tree the next town over and weakly flirting with the girl at the cash register on weekdays, walking an average of seven thousand steps a day because even if you could get a car, who can pay for the fucking  _ insurance?  _

No, they ask him:  _ what are you going to put on your resume? Your college applications? How are you willing to supplicate yourself for an institution that wants your money more than it wants you to fucking remain alive? What can you do to benefit that institution? What can you do to benefit  _ anyone _?) _

 

x

 

Whirl tracks down Chromedome by skulking through the student union every other day. He sits in the bookstore attached to the Seattle’s Best or outside at one of the cheap metal tables with a coffee, always sort of on high alert for the five-foot-nothing and their friend or Brainstorm or the person he’d seen Rung with that night. It’s about a week in and he’s beginning to realize he might be acting like a stalker, or at the very least a weird creep with no reason to hang out here, when he spots him walking out of the food court with an absolutely  _ tiny  _ person wearing a  _ Divine Comedy  _ t-shirt, barely up to Chromedome’s chest capital t  _ Tiny.  _

“ - No, I’m serious! The editing team spent weeks Photoshopping each discrete frame because his hands weren’t ‘manly’ enough or whatever,” they’re saying, and as they do they switch their hold on the messenger bag they’ve got slung around one shoulder to the other hand so they can reach out and grab Chromedome’s, giving it a little swing without seeming to notice. Whirl blinks, bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself from bursting out laughing.

_ Rewind,  _ he guesses.

He almost doesn’t want to interrupt the idyllic tableau. Almost. 

He opens his mouth to say something awful and very, very loud to catch their attention, but it gets caught halfway through his mouth as a choke as Chromedome suddenly stops, laughs quietly, shakes his head, and bends down to kiss maybe-Rewind on the cheek. Rewind beams.

He watches them cross the student union and then disappear down the slope of the hill before shoving his chair back and storming back towards home. He tries not to focus on the fact he spent a week waiting only to run away; he tries not to think about either of them at all.

He calls Brainstorm in the middle of the night the next day and isn’t quite surprised when they pick up, and they spend the weekend getting lazy-drunk and watching bad cartoons from Netflix on their laptop. Whirl doesn’t ask if they want him to eat them out again, or vice versa, because fucking to get your mind off of the fact you can’t really feel anything anymore once is fine, but twice is just unhealthy. He does, however, let them run their hands across the lines inked into his bicep Roadbuster did his senior year four or five beers in, because it feels good to feel wanted, even for half an hour.

“What are these?” They ask, slurred into a half-whisper, near his ear. Whirl feels like he’s going to explode. 

“Hn?  _ Oh,  _ they’re, uh, Roman numbers - numerals! Numerals, that’s it. Y’know, like a clock or s’mthin’.”

(It had taken Roadbuster  _ days,  _ but he was happy to do it - quiet, always bored Roadbuster, constantly looking for a project, found one in Whirl’s skin - stuck a needle into the top layers until it almost hurt, over and over again, evenly spaced big block letters with two thick bands encircling them.)

(There’s another, that Whirl asked Springer to do, low across his back, but Brainstorm doesn’t need to know about that one.)

“Mm,” Brainstorm hums noncommittally, and yawns.

After they leave, Whirl checks his reflection in the handheld bathroom mirror while he’s making sure he didn’t gnaw a hole through the side of his cheek last night, tugs on one of ponytails slowly falling loose from its band, snaps the attachment onto the bikini trimmer he bought last year and never used, and turns it on.

 

x

 

(He did this once before, remember?

Sometime after he came to school with his hands sunk deep into his pockets, when the snow really began to fall. What’s the point of keeping a ponytail when you can’t tie it back, braid it? It fell in strange ways around his ears and got into his eyes for a few days before he decided he’d had enough, and took the pair of scissors from the kitchen and pressed them as close to his scalp as he could.

It was almost worth it, how often he got called  _ he  _ after that.)

 

x

 

Rung talks to him a little more earnestly their next session, like something’s been worrying him and he needs to get the words off his tongue  _ now  _ or Whirl will never get to hear them.

“I think I’ve finalized a treatment plan for you, Whirl, something I think will help both of us navigate - “

“ _ Treatment plan?  _ Doc, I told you, I can either come see you or drown myself in booze a few times a week, I don’t have the money to dump into prescriptions.”   
“If you would let me finish,” Rung says, the slightest tenseness to his voice. Whirl smirks - to him that must be tantamount to  _ screaming,  _ the poor motherfucker.

“‘Treatment plan’ refers to you seeing me in a structured, beneficial way. I wanted to make sure it was as effective as possible, but between your infrequent visits and your…  _ restraint  _ in talking to me about personal issues, collecting information took longer than I expected.”   
“I get it, yeah, I’m not a model patient,” Whirl says, annoyed, gesturing with one hand. 

Rung gives him a patronizing look. He wonders if he even realizes he’s doing it, sometimes.   
“The point is, I think I’ve identified some big problems we can work on together, given time and investment, but Whirl, I need to know that you’re willing to actually  _ work  _ on these things, that you’re not just here because you feel like you should be, or have to be, or because you’re bored. I’m not one for relying on diagnoses as explanations, but I have a few that I think could help you understand the way you’ve been feeling, to give you a lens through which to see your behaviors and emotions as connected or explainable, or help you feel more in control to give it a name.”

Whirl gives him a suspicious side-eye. “Yeah? What’re those?”   
Rung crosses his legs and fidgets with his glasses, suddenly seeming a little nervous.

“I think, for starters, that you’ve been suffering with quite a lot of trauma for a very long time, from different people and events. Some of it you struggle with daily, and some of it you try to avoid or cover over. The effects of it are amplified by your anxiety, which feeds into reliving past traumas like a feedback loop. I’m not comfortable diagnosing it definitively, but I think you may also have a version of bipolar disorder called bipolar two, based on how you’ve talked about your depressive episodes, your mood, and the sudden upticks in risky behavior. You’ve also exhibited signs of an anger disorder, but that to me doesn’t seem psychological as much as it seems reactive, behavioral. None of these things inherently make you  _ bad,  _ Whirl, or  _ wrong,  _ but they can hurt you in ways that are difficult to recover from, and I’m willing to work with you through as many of them as you can or want to, if you are.”

“Y’know, Rung,” Whirl says, staring at the laces of his boots from where they’re kicked up against the other arm of the couch. He thinks maybe he should be angry, or frustrated, or storm out of the room - that sounds like him - but instead he feels sort of calm, sort of  _ relieved. _

“One day you’re gonna make a real good therapist, yeah?”

Rung leans back, smiling quietly. 

 

x

 

(That’s the fun part of the Polyhex limbo:

You think you’re low enough, lower than you’ve ever been, that any shift in the bar feels like a godsend, like improvement, even if it’s microscopic, even if it’s just settling into place.

And you never know how low it gets, not really, not until it drops again, and however low you thought it went, at least you know it can get worse.)

 

x

 

Chromedome texts him two days after his appointment with Rung, in the middle of his shift. Chromedome, of all people. 

_ Stole your number from Brainstorm’s phone, figured you wouldn’t mind. Watching a shitty movie tomorrow night with some people at our dorm, if you wanted to come? _

_ It’s Chromedome, by the way. _

Whirl lets the notification go unchecked until after he clocks out around two AM. His legs are sore from standing and he’s exhausted to the very bones of him, like he has been for the past week. He’s been fighting laying down for too long to do anything about it, though, too scared that once he does he won’t want to get back up. 

He curls up against the tile of his bathroom floor, to give his legs something cold to press against, and finally answers.

_ Only if there’s popcorn. _

 

x

 

(A fun fact about Chromedome: he’s asthmatic. Go figure, for a guy that’s built like Shaggy fucking Rogers and looks like he’s never run a mile in his life. A second, funnier fact is that Chromedome’s also the weed dealer for almost half of his dorm. 

The almost Romantic irony of this isn’t lost on him, nor is it lost on Rewind, who thinks the above two facts are  _ awful  _ and  _ serious  _ and hates it whenever Chromedome smokes, which means of course that he does it anyway, just not anywhere that his boyfriend can see him.

This leads Chromedome to offer to walk Whirl from the student union to their dorm just as the sun is starting to set, only to tell him they’re going to make a bit of a detour along the way.)

“Rewind’s friend Tailgate usually comes to movie nights like this,” Chromedome says, not really to let Whirl know but more to have something to do as they walk, “but he cancelled this morning, so it’ll just be you, me, Rewind, Swerve, First Aid, and Brainstorm, most likely.”

“Swerve’s the little cute one from the party on the green?” Whirl asks. He stuffs his hands into his pockets as Chromedome leads him toward a cluster of buildings, one broken in half by a series of connecting open-air hallways, like small concrete bridges spanning the split. They take two flights of empty stairs up at a building labeled  _ Hadeen.  _ Chromedome gives him a glance from over his shoulder as they hit the landing, but Whirl merely flashes him the meanest smile he can muster and keeps going. 

“What is it with you, exactly?” Chromedome asks, this time without looking behind him. In the semi-dark he looks a foot taller than he actually is, just a little shorter than Whirl, and for a moment he’s overwhelmed with an unexplainable urge to shove him down these stairs. Watch and see if his disinterested mask of an expression falters - if he shows fear in those big bored eyes or not. 

“Hn,” he mumbles instead. 

“I’m serious - you show up one day and suddenly you’re just  _ hanging out _ around campus, with Brainstorm…”   
“I’m gonna stop you there, chief,” Whirl replies, and stops, slinging his arm around the banister and looking up at Chromedome from the adjacent stairwell. His chest feels tight in a way he can’t name but doesn’t like. He bites out a grin. “You, and your friends, and Brainstorm, are the most fun I’ve had in  _ years.  _ You’re all so  _ stressed  _ about classes and looking cool for your friends and what you’re gonna do with your lives or what fuckin’  _ party  _ you’re gonna go to, how you  _ look  _ and why that matters so fucking much. It’s  _ funny.  _ You’re all a  _ laugh riot _ .”

Chromedome looks like he’s about to tell him to fuck off and leave, but then something seems to click, to settle, and suddenly he smiles in a very quiet,  _ knowing  _ way.

“Oh,” he says, “Okay. I get it,” and keeps going.

Whirl doesn’t say anything, but he feels a scream build in his teeth that he swallows.

On the roof they find a handful of others - Chromedome smiles when he sees them all standing around in  _ the most suspicious way possible.  _ A genuine smile, this time. Whirl scuffs his boot. 

Brainstorm’s hopped up onto the lip of the roof, swinging their legs and chattering to a person in a big white hoodie that comes down almost to their knees and the kind of deep ruby hair cut sharp and chin-length that could only come out of a bottle. The tiny guy wearing flip-flops despite it being early spring that he recognizes as Swerve is talking to another person almost two whole feet shorter than Whirl, with faded blue hair and a big endearing smile and a fanny pack that says something in white he can’t really make out - he thinks he might have seen him milling around the party or talking to one of the varsity kids, but he’s not sure.

Brainstorm gets off his precarious perch when he sees Whirl, but makes a beeline for Chromedome.

“Alright, can somebody put on their flashlight?” He says. Swerve obliges and hands over his phone. Chromedome grabs a few things out of his bag and sets them on the lip of the roof, where Brainstorm was sitting, and says “Gimme a second.”

_ Oh,  _ Whirl thinks,  _ well, I should’ve figured, I guess.  _

Without friends to depend on for weed, and no way in hell to get the kind of money needed to get his own, Whirl realizes it’s been a while since he’s actually been high. Kind of fucked up, come to think of it - getting out of your mind high is fun when you don’t really want to exist. 

“Aren’t you, uh, forgetting something, Domey?” Brainstorm asks, throwing themself down with crossed legs next to their friend and leaning against his back. 

“Hm?” Chromedome mutters, taking out a pack of honest to god cigars from a pocket, then quieter, “Fuck.”

Whirl pieces it together pretty quickly. “You forgot a fucking knife?” He asks, laughing, and reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket. He throws the pocket knife over, snorting as Brainstorm tries to catch it and fumbles. Chromedome shoots him a look, but takes it anyway and slits open the cigars expertly. The thing about Chromedome, the really, properly frightening thing, is that his hands never shake. He’s entirely in control, methodical, precise. Whirl looks over and spots the redhead kind of eyeing the same thing, wonders what the story is there.

It takes him less than two minutes to roll two joints, and he hands one of them to Swerve immediately. Whirl coughs up his lighter and hands it to him, too. Then he leans out over the edge of the building and waits. 

It’s funny, how fucking  _ Fight Club  _ about it they’re being, meeting up without Rewind as if he wouldn’t know immediately upon entering his and Chromedome’s dorm, out on top of the tallest building on campus where even the streetlights can’t touch. He’d laugh, but then he’d have to explain the joke, and that just ruins it.

The person in the hoodie comes over to stand next to him after a minute. Whirl barely looks up when they do, only half-listening to Swerve’s inane chattering and Chromedome’s half-response, realizes he’s got kind of a nice voice. 

“You’re not gonna join in?” Whirl asks after a beat. Hoodie looks over, startled, like they weren’t sure Whirl could speak, and he grins.

“I don’t smoke,” they say, and shrug. They’ve got a cute nose.

“Lucky you,” Whirl replies, and slides his pack of pall malls from his jeans. 

Both Chromedome and Swerve have a high tolerance, and Brainstorm and the little fanny pack person decide to take hits too - Whirl watches Brainstorm out of the corner of his eye cough and make a face, smirks a little - so they’re up there for five or ten minutes just watching the stairwell and the street below in turns. It’s enough time for Whirl to really start to feel the creeping pre-high. It starts in his fingers and his muscles, the slick slow slide. Almost like the way decking Impactor felt that first time, except then it was exponentially faster - that feeling on a treadmill cranked to max. 

After another minute he catches himself staring down out over the lip of the building and wondering, and immediately pulls away. 

_ Oh, okay.  _

 

x

 

(There was a reason Whirl stopped smoking, why he switched to cigarettes - harder to get, but easier to swallow a nicotine high that makes the sides of your vision go black for a minute or two than the pacing-shaking-moving-vomiting marijuana high that lasts an hour or two. 

He forgot that he wasn’t  _ happy _ , that he was seeing Rung to keep a bullet out of his brain and not to shoot the shit, that he fucked Brainstorm that night after two or three shots of vodka, not that they’re  _ friends.  _ He’d almost let himself forget, out on the roof, that he’d been pulled into this friend group as a  _ side show,  _ an obligatory tag-along because he happened to stumble into the right party at the right time and no one bothered to  _ ask _ him if he belonged there or not. Almost forgot that he  _ didn’t  _ belong.

They leave after that, trek all the way back up to Chromedome and Rewind’s dorm. Whirl doesn’t really pay attention to the movie, although he thinks he’s seen it before, just curls up on a bean bag chair and runs his fingers over the ticklish stubble of his buzzcut, watches Brainstorm out of the corner of his eye stare vacantly at the screen for a few minutes and then tap their foot to a rhythm he can’t hear.)

 

x

 

Whirl offers to bring Brainstorm home. Chromedome seems uneasy with the idea for a second, then notices the way Rewind’s looking at him, and quietly ushers everyone out the door. Whirl smirks as it clicks shut behind them. 

“Just you and me, gorgeous,” he says. Brainstorm doesn’t look up from where they’re staring at a poster pinned to the dorm’s community calendar. 

“Hey,” he says, nudging them, “you good?”

They look over at him with big, bloodshot eyes, stuffing their shaking hands into their pockets. “Little too high,” they mutter, biting their lip. 

Whirl sighs. “It’s fine, I’ll walk you back, okay? Get you some water, put on some old cartoons or something.” 

Brainstorm nods, and as soon as they’re both out the door latches onto Whirl’s arm with both of their own. Whirl rolls his eye. 

“Campus genius, can’t figure out when they’ve had too much weed, huh?” 

Brainstorm offers to let him stay the night, looks kind of like they could use the company, but Whirl’s settling into a post-high that’s vibrating in his bones and he thinks if he stays in this room all night he might punch Brainstorm in the teeth. 

He shuts the door quietly to the opening song of  _ Jimmy Neutron,  _ lays his head against it for a second.

He walks back to the overpass near his apartment, stands under it, tries not to scream. 

 

x

 

He goes back there every night for three days. 

10:15, 12:35, 1:45 - he smokes a cigarette, then two, then three, then coughs for a minute straight and lays down on the patchy grass before he can pass out.

The fourth night he stands on top of the overpass.

 

x

 

Semis hauling cross-country loads, didn’t he say? Big ones, with trailers attached, pulling all-nighters to get to their drop off in the morning. They’ll stay in a motel somewhere, get some food, sleep, before heading back home. That morning, while Whirl slept through his alarm, they were slugging down two or three mugs of coffee to keep up with the sun, chasing it across the highway.

He’d bought himself Chinese take-out from a place on the edge of campus on the way home, ate it on the median divider, kicking his legs in time to the almost non-existent midnight traffic.

(He’d thought about a high-dive off the side of this thing, straight down into the wash beneath, but it wasn’t far enough from the ground, he thought, and fucking himself up more isn’t the goal, is it?

Is it?)

 

“Polyhex limbo,” He says to himself, almost whistling the words out, as he sets aside the box of fried rice. Never did get that pocket knife back from Chromedome. He can keep it.

He starts chattering to himself as he gets up, stretches, looks up at the wide night sky - something to keep his head occupied as a sudden sting of  _ panic  _ hits him low in the stomach. True and proper  _ fear.  _

“Now shut up a minute while I say my peace,” he mumbles, “My life - I’ll be honest with you - hasn’t been that easy lately.”

(How low can you go?)

(How low - )

Whirl sticks his hands in his pockets.

“I’ve had some ups and downs, y’know? I’ve taken some knocks.”

(How low - )

Waits for high-beams to come barrelling down the straightaway, two beams of white, purifying light.

“Yeah, I know - “

_ (How low - ) _

Steps out. 

 

x

 

(Here’s what they don’t ask you: 

What if you don’t want to? 

At the end of the day, after all of the supplicating and bootlicking and  _ trying,  _ really truly  _ trying _ , to get a job, to get into a college, what if you don’t want to? 

There’s days when the only thing that happens is he rolls over in bed and tries to go back to sleep. Days when he grins and bears it and gets up and goes through the song-and-dance, days in between. 

How low is the bar set? How low can you bring it down? Can you lower people’s expectations,  _ your  _ expectations, to the point where being alive itself is a pleasant surprise?

_ Do you go here? What do you want to do?  _ As if he’d ever had the answers to those. As if anyone could  _ tell him, just please fucking tell me so I can do it and get over this.  _

What’s the answer when the question is  _ why do I have to?  _

No, really - I’m asking for a friend.)

 

x

 

Whirl’s only ever lost three fights. 

One, to Impactor, and another to some motherfucker calling himself ‘Killmaster’, and one to - 

Well - 

One to - 

 

x

 

(One to himself.)

 

x

 

Something latches onto his arm immediately, followed by something that sounds like a  _ scream,  _ and then the same ripping, tearing weight on his other arm. He stumbles, angry, awful tears in his eyes stinging the bridge of his nose, and he’s midway through the motion of turning forward, meeting those two tunnels with the lights at the end, the poetic John Green  _ justice  _ of it like a fucking siren song, and then he’s on the ground chewing steel grey asphalt.

“What in the  _ hell,”  _ h e's aware of someone asking next to him - he's thinking kind of the same thing.

Whirl rolls himself over, tries looking up at the stars. There’s no stars in heaven, right? Just big fluffy white clouds and Jesus, he always thought.

_ Fuck _ . 

He starts laughing immediately. His mind goes completely blank and in a moment of perfect clarity and spatial awareness he begins  _ bawling his eyes out laughing.  _ Full-bodied wracks, sobbing, screaming giggles. 

“What,” he says, in a chewed-asphalt voice, “the  _ fuck.  _ What the fuck!”

His arm’s yanked again and suddenly he’s upright, still giggling, looking straight across at a person he distantly recognizes as the tall one from campus, the one with the thing for the color  _ aubergine.  _

Whirl tastes blood. He’s cut through his tongue with his teeth. He’s still laughing. 

He immediately swings at his rescuer. 

“What the  _ fuck!”  _ He screams, “ _ What the fuck! What the fuck did you do?”  _

This person grabs his arm, but can’t move out of the way quick enough to avoid Whirl’s other fist, and suddenly Whirl  _ explodes,  _ tackling them both to the ground and throwing punch after punch, close-fisted, uncaring, all of them at the mouth and the nose and the  _ eyes,  _ ripping with his nails and wailing like some kind of dying animal. Words thrown in with half-words and voiceless, heaving  _ shrieks  _ that come from somewhere deep in his chest.

“Stop stop stop stop stop let me - let me  _ die, you motherfucker just let me why won’t you let me FUCKING - “ _

His head snaps to the side as the person under him lands a single, controlled punch to his jaw. The pain makes his eyes water, and the feeling is like  _ home,  _ like yelling and biting and shoving at Impactor in a county jail cell, like smashing glass over Fort Max’s head. 

He sits back on his heels and stares at the road under him, drooling blood. 

After a second he collapses back down and leans against the median, bending his knees close to his chest and running fingers over the knuckles of one hand, scraped raw. 

After a beat his savior ducks back down into his vision, smart enough not to crouch within arm’s reach but as close as they can be. 

“Give me your phone - I’ll call someone.”

“Fuck you,” Whirl spits. 

They sigh, run a hand down their face. 

“If you won’t let me contact someone, I’ll have to keep an eye on you myself. I don’t think that’s something either one of us wanted out of their night.” 

Whirl snorts. 

“I  _ will,”  _ they say.

Whirl looks at them - they’re obviously tired, cold, a little steely at the set of their mouth but not as old as he’d originally thought. 

They close their eyes for a moment as though composing themselves. “You’ll come with me, then.”    
“No.”   
“I can beat you into unconsciousness and  _ take  _ you with me.”   
“You fucking wouldn’t.”   
“Don’t assume things about people you don’t know.”   
Whirl spits at them, rolling his tongue against his front teeth, checking.

After a second, something dawns on him, and he smiles wide and beaming. 

_ I won. Heh. _

_ I fucking won. _

 


	3. iii

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whirl leans forward, hands on his knees. He scuffs the toe of one of his boots against the floor.  
> “I want,” he says, quiet, and tries to make the words count, to find something of meaning to say, to pull something out of the very core of him that’s true and real for once in his fucking life. And then it slots into his head. Easy.  
> “I want my fucking hands back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey ghouls and goblins! kind of a short one this time, but i'm back!! nice.  
> muse(ic) is: idle worship by paramore  
> enjoy, and i love you!  
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label (part three) : reoccurring mentions of suicidal ideation and self-destructive behavior, depression, and a failed suicide attempt

 

**iii**

 

x

He walks back with his wayward rescuer - _“Cyclonus.” “For fuck’s sake.” -_ to his apartment on the outskirts of campus, where the city meets the suburb.

It’s nearly silent besides their movements echoing off the sidewalk and the distant industrial hum of traffic nearby.

“You’re not asking too many questions here, Cyclonus,” Whirl observes. His head is tilted back to watch the clouds cross over the stars. The taste of blood in his mouth has faded to something more like an old battery stuck to his tongue.

“I don’t think questions are necessary,” they say, firmly not looking over at him, “I’ve seen enough, an explanation would be redundant.”

Whirl blinks. “Fine, then, I guess.”

After two blocks of utter silence, Cyclonus finally sighs.

“What’s your name?”

Whirl grins but doesn’t quite feel it on his face. He feels the way novacaine tastes.

 

x

 

(“What do you _want,_ Whirl?” Rung asks one night, rubbing at his forehead as he does. In a clear, solidified moment this is the most desperate, the most _frustrated_ Whirl’s ever seen him. He looks like his throat is ringed with angry words, words that should be yelled and screamed, that he keeps trying to swallow back down, or chew out into a softer tone, and Whirl wonders if he tried hard enough if he could see a bit of himself in him in this moment.

_What do you want?_

It’s a question few and far between, isn’t it? He’s heard the cousins of this question, the _Why are you here?s_ and _What did you do?s_ , but this is a rare breed. This is an earnest plea for Whirl to cooperate, to open up, _something_ other than short quips and rigor mortis grins.

It doesn’t hit him for a second, then two, but Whirl realizes Rung _means it -_ beneath the frustration, these are real words. He’s asking to _know_ . And it’s not something he’s ever really thought about, he thinks - beyond the day he’s in, the day after that, moment to moment, Whirl’s never had _aspirations_ or _goals_ or _dreams,_ always felt annoyed and angry at people who do, who wave them around like their twelve-stepping into success does anything but irritate people like him; fucked up and spit out and fundamentally alone.

Whirl leans forward, hands on his knees. He scuffs the toe of one of his boots against the floor.

“I want,” he says, quiet, and tries to make the words count, to find something of meaning to say, to pull something out of the very core of him that’s true and real for once in his fucking life. And then it slots into his head. Easy.

“I want my fucking hands back.”)

 

x

 

Cyclonus doesn’t say anything as they hold the door open on the third floor of a complex a few blocks away from the university proper. The sun’s just coming up over the skyline outside - that time of day when the world is hazy pink and still. Whirl feels like he wants to sleep for centuries.

“Cyclonus! Have you seen my laptop charger!” Comes an immediate voice from inside. Whirl jumps a little.

Cyclonus makes an ushering gesture, and follows Whirl in, closing the door gently behind them. They walk around the corner into an adjoining room and disappear from sight without a word. Whirl glances back at the door. He puts his hand on the doorknob. It’s shaking, just slightly.

Before he can commit to the action, a little head pops out from the next room. They’ve got bleached platinum hair that almost looks like Brainstorm’s and a set of navy glasses and the most worried look Whirl’s ever seen. Rung-level worried. Olympic, even.

“Hi, oh my god. D’you... wanna sit?”

Whirl just looks at them for a long moment.

“Not really.”

They inexplicably smile.

“Gimme a second, I’m Tailgate, by the way. It’s kind of mess here, sorry, I’ll, uh -” And they duck back out of his sight.

Whirl white-knuckles the doorknob. _Turn it,_ he tells himself. _Turn the fucking handle._

“Sit down!” Cyclonus’ voice barks from the other room. It’s followed by a storm of semi-audible whisper-yelling.

_Turn. The handle._

Whirl walks over to the futon set against the far wall and throws himself down on it. A headache is building in the corners of his eyes.

(Rung once told him that breathing deep can help swallow anger, calm himself down, a miracle cure for the feeling of wanting to scream and deck someone and knock himself unconscious all at once. He tried it once and felt stupid counting in his head to pace his lungs.)

Whirl takes a deep breath in through his nose and holds it. _Maybe I’ll pass out if I just don’t breathe for a while,_ he thinks inanely.

After a full minute Cyclonus and their flatmate walk back into the room.

 _Huh,_ Whirl thinks, and then immediately on the heels of that, _Fuck._

It’s the duo from the student union, from the party, tall and tiny, cute and scary.

He thinks passing out might be the best course of action here.

“Okay, so uh,” says the little one - five foot nothing, half-dressed, looking like they’re staring down a ghost or something, “Cyclonus kind of explained what’s going on, and um, if it’s okay with you, we’d like you to stay here for a while. Until somebody can pick you up, I guess.”

Behind them, Cyclonus folds their arms but doesn’t react.

There’s something tugging at Whirl’s mind, but it’s vague and just out of reach, and he can’t really find it in himself to focus on it. He tries instead to feel angry, or indignant, or _something_ other than the hollow weight gradually condensing in his stomach, an ache like a broken bone.

Cyclonus places a hand on Tailgate’s shoulder for a moment, then turns away.

“I’ll make coffee.”

 

x

 

Tailgate sits next to him and sifts through Netflix for something to watch (there’s no category for ‘post-suicide attempt’, shockingly) with their feet tucked in to the side, and Cyclonus makes coffee for the two of them as well as a mountain of freezer waffles reheated in a toaster. They glance at Tailgate.

“You have to go.”

Tailgate shrugs, tries to hide the look they throw Whirl’s way. “I can skip this morning, Cy. Go sleep, we’re okay out here.”

Cyclonus huffs and sits down next to them without another word. Tailgate shoots them a look but after a minute leans against their arm.

 _Figured,_ Whirl thinks, and forces himself to steal a waffle. His coffee goes cold quickly - he thinks if he has caffeine right now he might burst into flames and then resolidify as a living livewire, and the thought of it makes his mouth taste sour and bitter like panic.

Tailgate settles on a John Mulaney special.

 

x

 

(Whirl’s very good at a few things - fist fights, self-sabotage, drinking contests, Deadpool impersonations, pissing off cops.

This isn’t really one of them.

This isn’t part of the script.)

 

x

 

Cyclonus falls asleep sitting up about an hour in. Half an hour later Tailgate nudges Whirl with their foot.

“D’you want me to call someone? Or you could, I guess.”

Whirl realizes it’s a question without an answer. He wants to say _yes,_ to go home and sleep forever or at least pretend to sleep, to turn his head off for a few hours, but it’s a non-starter - who the fuck would he call? Brainstorm? Chromedome? _Rung?_ There’s no one here he could throw out the words _attempted suicide_ to and not get immediately hospitalized or dropped. Even back in Polyhex - _Impactor? Roadbuster? As if they even remember his name?_ All of his relationships are tangential or shallow or _therapy-based._ The bridge of his nose starts to sting, and he clenches his teeth to make it go away.

Tailgate blinks after a second, mouth making a little _o_ as they seem to get it.

“You can stay here the night, if you need to. It’s boring, but it’s quiet.”

Whirl feels tears in his eyes, but he can’t get up, can’t move, there’s nothing for him to move _toward_ or away from and everything in the world is suddenly just these two strangers on a couch and a bunch of cold waffles on the table and nothing at all _left_.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, “Yeah. Okay.”

 

x

 

(Whirl had had a crush once upon a time, you know. Just the one that he can remember, but it was there. Like a gaping hole in his chest, but there. He doesn’t really even remember their name, just that they were nice. Kind of a smartass. Gentle.

This was before the anger that snapped into his bones really got its claws in him, before his eye, before his hands. Before Impactor.

Sometimes he wonders about them, how they are now, who they are now. If they ever got out of Polyhex. If they’re like him, still stuck between two places, Polyhex limbo-made-purgatory.

He wonders, too, if he could ever have been good for them. If he can be good for anyone, really, but take them as an example. If something inside him has fundamentally broken, snapped beneath the layers and layers of what he’s made himself into. If someday that little voice that used to tell him not to do things, to stop, to keep himself from swinging first or saying the thing he shouldn’t, will ever pipe up again. If one day this unspeakable _anger_ inside him is going to leave, and what he’ll do after that.

It’s the one thing he’s genuinely terrified of.)

 

x

 

Both Tailgate and Cyclonus offer to walk him home in the morning that night, individually. Tailgate’s tied a scarf around their dreads, pale blue with little golden decals of the university’s logo, when they bring him a cup of hot chocolate around midnight.

“Look I don’t, uh,” they say, and shuffle nervously, “Neither of us really get how to deal with this. And, um, we’re just… Trying our best, really. I want you to know that.”

Whirl stares into his mug. He can hear Tailgate bite down on a sigh.

“Okay. Listen. Here’s what we can do.”

Cyclonus walks in a bit later. His footsteps are soft, like he’s trying not to alert the room to his entrance. He’s changed into a button-up with a sheen like polished glass, obviously going somewhere, and Whirl has to forcibly rip his attention away and back onto rolling his empty mug between his palms.

_Dumbass._

“I’m not convinced you aren’t going to try again,” he says after a long moment. When Whirl looks back over he’s pulling books down from a far shelf, setting them into a neat pile.

Whirl huffs. “You won’t have to find out if you stay out of my business. Not that I’m not grateful, of course, but I’m not.”

Cyclonus half-turns his head over one shoulder. “So we’re the only two keeping you alive, yes?”

“Seems like it, stud.”

Cyclonus snorts under his breath and turns back to the shelf. He’s as tall as Chromedome, maybe an inch or two shy of Whirl’s height, but built like a steel girder. Whirl’s not sure he really stood a chance on that overpass at all, now, especially with all the weight he’s lost in the past few months.

“Then we’ll have to make it our business to do so.”

“Hn? Why? You’ve seen me, like, three times in your entire life, counting last night.”

“Because the alternative is letting you die.”

Whirl doesn’t really have a response to that.

 

x

 

Around five in the morning he sneaks out the front door, anyway.

He’s not a reformed man just because he can’t goddamn die in peace.

 

x

 

(It’s an inherently violent act, isn’t it? Aggressive, life. Forced onto the world, onto other people who pay witness, by one person.

Whirl’s always been good at that.)

 

x

 

He wakes up early to go see Rung. The morning has completely forgotten the events of the other night, _tabula rasa_. It’s rose-pink and cloudy when he steps onto campus, kids heading back to their dorms with their heads ducked and their earbuds in.

Rung asks him how he’s been - he always does when he walks in. There’s a new ship on the wall, painted blue and yellow and red and grey.

Whirl grins at him, the gesture sucking at his cheeks.

“Never better, doc.”

 

x

 

_you should come to the student union whenever you get a chance. I can meet you after my 2 pm and get lunch?_

_it’s tailgate, by the way :)_

 

x

 

Whirl drifts around his apartment for an hour - it’s not really pacing, just walking in a lazy circle like a broken Roomba. It occurs to him as soon as he steps out of Rung’s office that he can _try again,_ in the privacy of his own place, grab a knife or a belt or something, fuck, even just buy as much alcohol as he physically can at the corner store and lock the door behind him, it’s not like they’d stop him.

But he’s so _tired,_ bone-deep exhaustion that makes thinking much past that a struggle, but when he sprawls out on his bed he suddenly can’t close his eyes. He wonders if this is still the adrenaline, not entirely gone from his system, just crashing in stages. He feels the strange unfocused dizziness of sleep deprivation - he hadn’t slept at all last night, just ate up whatever was auto-played on Netflix, and the night before that, well.

On his next circuit he stops in front of the wall separating the main room from the bathroom and slams his forehead against it. It makes a nice hollow _thunk._ He sighs.

Then he grabs his navy blue bomber and the boots shucked off at the door.

 _Meet you in 15ish_.

 

x

 

He and Tailgate sit on the grass on the slope of the hill with to-go boxes of tex-mex. They’re back in the thigh-highs he’d first seen them in and corduroy shorts. He can kind of make out the titles of the books they’d been carrying from where they’re holding up their drinks. They’re in an anthropology program, maybe, or ancient history.

“What d’you do for fun, Whirl?” They ask around a stuffed jalapeno.  
“Fun? You mean, legal fun?”

Tailgate nudges him with his shoulder. They could almost pretend they didn’t if he pointed it out - they barely touch.

“Legal fun.”

“Can’t think of anything off the top, tiny. The wash has some weird stuff sometimes, but that’s not really _fun,_ I guess.”

Tailgate brightens. “You ever been to the arcade down near _Hadeen_?”

 

x

 

(Tailgate’s in archeology, but for a while they did a stint in the fine arts program, and one of their classmates suggested the arcade for inspiration, they tell Whirl on the walk over. It’s a huge open-air garage, lit by strings of fairy and Christmas lights, so many it can’t be legal, filled with mismatched couches and vintage pinball machines. A vending machine in the back pops out two lukewarm cokes for them and they spend an hour playing pinball while the sun starts it arc back toward the horizon.

For a second Whirl catches a glint of the helix piercing they have on one ear, a stud of a little silver robot, as they push their hair back and bite their lip over a Spider-Man themed machine, and he smiles.

It’s a good night, he thinks.)

 

x

 

Cyclonus texts him that night, inviting him out the next morning, but Whirl doesn’t like the idea of them ping-ponging him between them to keep an eye out, so he cites a fake work shift and deletes the messages. Tailgate’s, too.

Brainstorm texts him around noon.

_outside your building, club meeting and youre invited_

“What fucking club?” Whirl yells down from his window. Three stories below, a tiny shock of bleached white hair jumps. Brainstorm looks up.

“The club whose party you crashed when we met!” They half-yell back, looking around as though worried of being reprimanded. _Too fucking nerdy for their own good,_ Whirl thinks.

“You’re in a goddamn _fraternity?”_ He yells.

“Not officially, no!”

Whirl narrows his eyes.

“Booze?”

“No.”  
“Weed?”

“No…”

Whirl straightens and grabs the crank to close the window.

Brainstorm extends their arms and blinks big wide eyes up at him. Even from thirty feet up they’re goddamn _guileless._

“Me!”

Whirl bursts out laughing and slams the pane closed. Ten minutes later they head towards the campus together.

 

x

 

The Down Low club’s got a long and storied history of name changes and reworkings

From what Whirl can gather from Brainstorm’s mile-a-minute (they’re almost as bad as Swerve, what they lack in _amount_ made up for in speed), they used to be an unofficial fraternity - Lambda Lambda - started by some sophomore who thought he was hot shit. It was, of course, shot down almost immediately, but that didn’t mean fuck-all to a group of half-genius half-menace college kids.

Over time LL became double L, became DL, became down low. It was a joke that wasn’t. Brainstorm said Swerve came up with it, because of _course_ he did. Still, they shrugged and said it was better than what he’d first suggested.

“Which was?” Whirl asked, nudging them. Brainstorm grimaced and kicked a pebble. They had on eyeliner today, neon blue kohl.

“The _Crusadercons.”_

Whirl had to stop and sit down for a full minute so he didn’t throw up laughing.

 

x

 

Brainstorm’s fraternity-that-isn’t meets in a coffee shop on the other side of the campus from the student union, the one that’s across three full lanes of traffic and has a mural of that scene from _ET_ painted onto the outer wall facing the parking lot. Whirl immediately spots Chromedome and Rewind sitting at a booth, and then his eye slides over to who they’re sharing a booth with.

 _Fuck_.

“Work shift?” Cyclonus asks in the driest imaginable voice as he and Brainstorm approach.

Whirl makes a noise like tires struggling for purchase on asphalt and turns away to look for other people to hang out with.

He gets maybe three steps away when a hand meets his shoulder. He freezes, a heat memory of _Impactor_ flashing across the back of his neck before he shakes it away by tugging at the end of one of his pigtails.

It’s only Tailgate, looking at him with those big blue eyes they have - but in an instant Whirl feels sick to his stomach, the absolute certainty that _he was going to deck them, lay them out flat just for touching him_ hard and cold sliding down his throat.

“Come hang out with us?” They ask.

“Rather not, pipsqueak,” Whirl manages. It takes everything in his limited self control not to break his own fingers curling them into fists.

Tailgate frowns. They’re wearing overalls, actual overalls, with patches of different flowers ironed on over a t-shirt that says _Roswell 1947._ Whirl almost wants to cry.

“ _Please.”_

And that’s how he joins Lambda Lambda.

 


	4. iv

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (He remembers how it felt, having his eye taken out. Didn’t hurt as much as you’d think. Hurt worse. It wouldn’t stop bleeding.  
> Accident, fell on a branch in the woods, clumsy fuckin’ kid, scared the shit out of us.  
> He remembers when his hands were whole. He was good with ‘em, too. That’s the shitty part. He was really into clocks as a kid. He could build ‘em, even. Spent hours tinkering with scraps from the autobody in town. For a month he couldn’t move his fingers.  
> Accident, crushed ‘em under the car, wanted to go for a joyride. Fuckin’ kid, right?  
> Right?  
> Cried like a wounded animal, didn’t you? Cried and yelled and tried to dig up some kind of strength, some will to defend yourself, but couldn’t. Couldn’t, and took it. Just kept fucking taking it as you were ripped apart.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy holidays!! time for some Gay Shit
> 
> muse(ic) is townie by mitski  
> enjoy, and i love you!   
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label (part four) : reoccurring mentions of self-destructive behavior, depression, themes of struggling with and working through trauma, physical violence (specifically between whirl and cyclonus and whirl and megatron, but also general references to violence), mentions of past abuse

 

**iv**

 

x

 

Rodimus, fraternity leader and owner of a Fucking Awful Name, rings in the meeting.

“We’ve achieved something!” They yell out over the small-ish group filling up most of the booths - Whirl recognizes more people than he thought he would; there’s Swerve, Chromedome, Rewind, First Aid, Pipes, Nautica, Cyclonus and Tailgate, Brainstorm, and a pretty solidly-built nerd standing in the back who Brainstorm keeps eyeing with the least amount of finesse possible that Whirl gathers is Perceptor. There’s also a med student who looks old enough to be a professor off to one side standing next to the tallest person Whirl’s ever seen dressed in a muted blue suit, and about a dozen other faces he can’t place.

“We’ve achieved something! Everyone turn to your left and shake hands with the person next to you - well, it won’t work if you  _ all _ do it -”

The person standing behind Rodimus nudges them to the side gently and smiles. 

“The charter we drafted to get the LL recognized officially as a fraternity was accepted for review with the direction and help of Magnus,” they nod to the absolutely  _ massive  _ business-formal in the corner.

“So we’re gonna be legit now?” Swerve pipes up.

“We  _ might  _ be legit,” Rodimus corrects. Their smile’s lopsided, but genuine.

“Aw, I kind of liked being fraternity pirates. We were kind of badass.”

“Were you?” Whirl mutters. He leans back and folds his arms as Brainstorm beside him snorts. There’s something about them a little off today, a little more manic than usual, a little weirdly  _ focused,  _ but he decides it’s not his problem. He’s learned Brainstorm’s never not hyper-focused, filled with a kinetic energy he keeps barely tethered to his skin.

“Oh, Swerve,” Rodimus says, “Don’t worry, we’re still gonna be totally  _ badass,  _ but now we’re gonna do it with support from the university, right Magnus?”

The suit flinches just slightly, like just the sound of their name from this undergrad with an aesthetic that could be kindly described  _ what if a jock went punk but didn’t commit and also had a flame kink _ made them viscerally upset. Which, when Whirl thought about it - yeah.

“As long as the agreed upon terms are honored, and the rumors of Lambda Lambda’s…  _ reputation  _ remain only rumors, then yes. It’s likely your charter will be approved.”   
Rodimus’ expression resets itself ever so slightly in a way Whirl recognizes like a reflex. He’s not sure if anyone else catches it, but in a moment of complete synergy, he can see the same flinty glee behind Rodimus’ eyes he’d worn so many times himself - it’s the look of someone about to get away with as much as they physically can, up to and including felonies, while having the time of their life doing it. 

Whirl leans back and throws an arm over the top of the booth, a raptor grin splitting open his face. He’s gonna like this club.

 

x

 

Rewind and Chromedome offer to take him, Cyclonus, Tailgate, and Brainstorm out for dinner after the semi-fraternity splits, Thai at a place near the student union. Rewind’s wearing a burnt orange jacket that looks three sizes too big for him, and he’s fiddling with the strap of his Nikon around his neck. Whirl sees both Brainstorm and Tailgate look over to him immediately and keeps his eye on Chromedome instead, who looks like he couldn’t be more disinterested in the rest of their little group. He’s got a scarf raised up to cover his mouth and nose, making his already unreadable-but-always-kind-of-bored expression even more cryptic.

_ How the fuck did I get stuck with Nerd Patrol, anyway?  _ Whirl asks himself. His teeth itch for a cigarette as he clenches them around the meat of his tongue. He knows exactly how.

“I should be going,” Cyclonus says with a nod, which makes Rewind jump. Whirl covers an ugly laugh with a cough. The noise is enough to make Cyclonus remember he’s still there, apparently, because he looks over with a blank face and says, “and so should Whirl. Have fun, Tailgate.”

“Have a good practice!” Tailgate beams, and grabs Rewind to drag him away back toward the student union. Brainstorm slots in next to Chromedome as he follows. 

Whirl folds his arms. It’s gotten colder at night, clearer and brighter than the fall, and it puts a shiver down through his ribs. His bomber’s the warmest thing he owns, but even that doesn’t stop the wind from cutting through him. January’s gonna be a goddamn bitch, he can already tell.

“Well, then, I guess I’ll be - “

“You lied,” Cyclonus says, easy. His face doesn’t change as he does. Whirl wonders if he’s able to express emotions at all, the stone-cold motherfucker. It’s like knowing a goddamn Sphinx or something.

“Yeah, I lied,” Whirl shrugs, “it’s not the first or the last time. You need me for something, or can I go?” He wants to go lie down under the underpass for a while, forget he exists, maybe.

Cyclonus cocks his head. It unsettles Whirl, how close they are in height, how close Cyclonus comes to looking him square in the eye - it’s like Chromedome’s  _ oh, okay. I get it,  _ all over again. He doesn’t like eye contact. It typically doesn’t end well.

“The other night, you had no one to call. But you have friends here - at least, people who seem to like you.”

Whirl feels blood curl into his mouth and realizes he’s bitten through his cheek. He’s not shivering because of the cold, now. There’s no one on the sidewalks sprawled next to them, no one at the intersection.

“Look, I’ve got somebody to psychoanalyze me already, alright? Now before I actually punch your fucking lights out,  _ do you need me for something or not?”  _

Cyclonus doesn’t even seem to hear him. 

“Why didn’t you call Brainstorm? Or Chromedome, Rewind?”

Whirl feels something crawl across the back of his hands, over his knuckles, scratching at the skin there.  _ Thick black slide.  _

“You’re gonna wanna stop talking.”

“I’m not sure I do. Tailgate seems to like you, and I trust their judgement enough to let some things go, but I want to know. You have people who would be hurt to have you gone, Whirl, but it doesn’t  _ mean anything  _ to you?”

Whirl decks him. 

To Cyclonus’ credit, he barely takes a step back, absorbing the impact neatly as his head snaps to the side. Immediately Whirl withdraws, one of his knuckles shifting under thin skin covered with a streak of blood. Cyclonus touches his nose, looks at the red-black stain it makes on his fingers with a detached kind of calm. 

(He’d seen that once before, remember?)

“Are you done?” Whirl hisses, quieter than he’d wanted but still loud as church bells in the sudden silence. Beside them, cars that had stacked up begin to peel away as the stoplights change.

In a moment so fast Whirl almost doesn’t see it, Cyclonus forms a fist with the hand still held close to his face and strikes him, hard, across the jaw, still tender from the last time he’d done that. Whirl exhales sharply, his bad eye forced down and away, but he forces himself not to make a move, to grab the bastard’s wrist and try breaking the bones underneath, to slam his knee into his diaphragm. Instead, he barks out a noise that isn’t a laugh at all and glares at him.

“You think I should’ve, what, told  _ Brainstorm?  _ ‘I’ve known you a month but I just tried to kill myself, mind if we hang out?’ Chromedome? ‘Remember that time you let me borrow your lighter, got another favor to ask you!’”   
“You’re being stupid,” Cyclonus says.

“I’m  _ right!”  _ Whirl screams. His ribs feel unglued, weightless in his chest, piercing into his lungs. His jaw feels half an inch from dislocation. His hands itch and burn. Cell door opening. Glass bottle breaking open against skin. 

“There’s  _ no one  _ who could’ve helped me! I would’ve been thrown into a fucking psych ward, and I know it, and  _ you  _ know it.”

“Hm,” Cyclonus’ expression hasn’t changed the entire time, still frozen in place like a stone, cold and dispassionate just like the rest of him. Whirl wonders if he could beat an expression out of him, throw enough punches to make him glare and bare his teeth, spit and swear around a fractured jaw,  _ something. _

“And now?”   
Whirl cradles his jaw with the palm of his hand. It hurts to talk. 

“And now  _ what?” _

“Now is there anyone to help you?”

Whirl looks at him in disbelief for a minute. The sounds of traffic slow back to a stop, and a sheen of red light covers them both. They both look inhuman, something out of a Del Toro movie, bloody and red and flushed pale in the cold, sparking with anger and unfinished violence.

_ Polyhex limbo.  _

A wash of tears fill his eye all of a sudden, the force of them stinging at his nose and cheeks, the wind making them cold as soon as they hit his skin. 

“No,” his voice cracks on the word. He covers his eye with a hand, digging in with the heel of his palm, trying to look away and hide his face but knowing it’s not going to work, the knowledge making it harder to stop, his chest still compressed and unable to take a deep breath and just  _ stop.  _

He doesn’t remember the last time he’d cried. It must’ve been after his hands, maybe. That was when he still had two eyes to cry through.

“Stupid,” Cyclonus says, quieter than Whirl’s heard him, almost soft. He doesn’t try to reach out for him or touch him, just stands there with a ring of blood around his nose, drying quickly in the winter air. 

“Shut the fuck up.”

Whirl lowers his hand, rubs at his face one last time, and clears his throat. He stuffs his hands in his pockets to keep from bolting.  _ Be a big girl, you can’t run away every fucking time you have emotions.  _

Cyclonus half-turns from him, toward the highway. 

“I’m going to the library, then to practice. Come with me.”

Whirl sniffs. He wants to lay down for a while, but the idea of pulling his blankets over himself in his ice-cold empty apartment makes him bite down on his lip to keep from crying again. He runs a hand roughly through his hair, slowly growing out over his ears and temples in a way that tickles.

“Yeah. Yeah, fine.”

 

x

 

Cyclonus fences, a sport Whirl genuinely didn’t think anybody still did. 

The place is spartan, almost sterile-looking, with old industrial brick walls painted white, large green gym mats set into one half of the floor, a strip of what looks like thick plexiglass taking up the other. Overhead electric scoreboards sit idling, marking the round as  _ 0 / 0.  _

Fencing gear looks ridiculous - the helmet looks like a beekeeper’s, the breastplate is just a rectangle of cheap white plastic, the swords aren’t even  _ sharp _ . Whirl sits near the entrance and flicks through the books Cyclonus had picked up at the library - mostly textbooks. Whirl’s never read a book longer than a couple hundred pages, doesn’t have the patience for it, but these books are about half again as big as his fucking  _ head  _ and have titles with colons in them like  _ Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought:  _ _ A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West _ . Whirl picks one at random and starts thumbing through the indices without really reading them just to give his hands something to do. 

There’s no one else around this time of night, really, just the person at the desk in the front reading through a book of their own, and a few straggling night class students who had all gone to the locker rooms when they’d walked in. Cyclonus had ignored all of them.

Here’s the thing about Cyclonus: all those years ago, when Whirl had sat in bars and clubs and watched people move around him, move  _ through  _ him as they talked and smiled and tried so hard to connect with someone, anyone - Cyclonus is the calm epicenter of that, a person so fundamentally unmoved by other people until he chooses to be it’s like staring down bedrock, a solid immutable core of something so big it scares Whirl. Brainstorm  _ tries,  _ tries so fucking hard, to look cool and collected and unaffected, says funny things to sound funny, got high to prove he could get high better than anyone else; Chromedome tries to look gentle, soft, around Rewind, sarcastically above it all without him. Everything was such a fucking  _ contest.  _ Cyclonus didn’t try to be anything, to do anything better or more than anyone else. He decked Whirl not because it made him look tough or because he thought he should, but because Whirl was being intensely punchable. Easy.

It’s almost nice. 

x

 

(It’s almost nice. 

Cyclonus is tall, not quite as tall as Chromedome, but nearly, and built far sturdier than either him or Whirl. It wasn’t even a contest - Whirl could fight, fight messy and dirty and sometimes even  _ well  _ when he really tried, but he was barely bones held together with skin, and he’d  _ felt  _ the kind of torque Cyclonus put behind a punch. He could break him down, easily. Whirl had given him the opportunities. He’d given him  _ so many fucking opportunities.  _

Finally, someone who stands a reasonable goddamn chance of tearing him apart.

But  _ won’t. _ )

 

x

 

Cyclonus invites him back to his and Tailgate’s after practice. The stars are out in full overhead, now, tiny pockets of light bunched together, backlit by the red-yellow-green of stoplights. Whirl feels dried out, hollow, a sour taste like getting blitzed out of your mind in his throat and moving up toward his nose. He can hear the wind moving through him like he’s not even there.

“I’ve got somewhere to be tomorrow,” Whirl mutters. It’s not really a lie - he’s going to see Rung in the morning, but the excuse is thin even to his ears. He doesn’t know why he says it. 

Cyclonus doesn’t say anything to that, just keeps walking. Whirl figures if he walked away right now and went back home he wouldn’t stop him. But he keeps in step. 

_ Dumb, dumb bastard. Just go home.  _

Tailgate had bought them take-out - both of them. There’s two silver aluminum boxes stacked on the coffee table, still warm. 

“Sit,” Cyclonus says, this time more of a request. Whirl’s not sure how to be  _ here,  _ in this room, this apartment, not when he’s not going to kill himself, not when that pressure doesn’t push down against his spine and stick like a film to his eyes. 

Tailgate comes out of the adjacent room with their laptop balanced on their forearms, and sits next to Whirl with a familiarity that makes him wince. 

“Are you studying?” Cyclonus asks as he moves to the kitchenette and pulls down a stack of paper plates. 

Tailgate rolls their eyes, “Yeah! Jeez.” 

They motion toward the takeout.

“I didn’t really know what you liked, so I got what Cyclonus usually gets. You don’t have to eat it.”

Whirl bites down on the inside of his lip, hard, and swallows a half-joke like a dry pill. His jaw still hurts, and he rides that pain, the only thing he can really feel through a coating of cold-numbed skin. It’s better than the alternative, maybe.

“Thanks,” he says, and lets Tailgate crack a smile at him in reply.

Cyclonus brings them pad thai on paper plates and Tailgate puts something on for background noise before ducking their head back down into whatever they’re reading. 

Whirl’s not really sure why he’s here. But that’s fine, he’s never really had a purpose for being somewhere, and it’s seemed to work out pretty fucking well for him so far. 

 

x

 

( _ Why didn’t you leave Polyhex? _

He tried, once. After his eye. Got as far as a bus station ten miles away from that awful fucking place with its awful fucking people, his half-defaced school building, the bat still buried beneath a tree somewhere, the cell with his blood still probably stuck to the edge of its metal bench, the playground where he slept sometimes, out under the stars inside a tube slide. 

But where would he go? Even a place you hate is a place you  _ know _ . People who you steal cigarettes from, get punched out by when you say something a little too smart, hang out in shitty bars with because there’s nowhere else for either of you to be, they’re still people you  _ know _ .

He’d sat at that bus stop for hours, shivering, feeling the weight of his backpack on his spine pressing it down into his ribs - all of his things, everything that proved he was here, fit into a fucking  _ Jansport _ . He watched two buses stop, wait, and move on without him, unable to move his feet to get up and leave.  _ Coward.  _

After five, maybe six hours, it started to rain. He walked home.

Belonging in places he doesn’t belong, that’s something Whirl’s good at.)

 

x

 

He goes to see Rung in the morning. Tailgate and Cyclonus let him crash on their couch, episodes of some shitty political drama on auto-play, half-eaten takeout on the table in front of him. 

(For a while he lays there and listens to the slow trickle of traffic, watches as the apartment building across the street goes dark window by window, as airplanes crawl overhead. It’s quiet - kingdom of one, and all.)

“You’re joining the Lambda Lambda fraternity?” Rung asks, a slight panic to his voice Whirl wouldn’t notice if he hadn’t been talking to him in this room for two and a half months already. Whirl raises an eyebrow. Rung’s couch isn’t as comfortable as Cyclonus and Tailgate’s.

“You usually spy on your patients, doc?”

Rung sighs. He does that a lot around Whirl. 

“I’m a member - I heard you had dropped in yesterday, for the meeting.”

Whirl scowls - figures his social circle would overlap with his  _ goddamn therapist’s,  _ Jesus Christ.

“Thinkin’ about it. They’re all assholes, your little club, you know that?”   
Rung smiles gently. He seems to do that a lot around Whirl, too, weirdly. 

“I’m aware. It’s one of the reasons I joined. Lots of, ah,  _ interesting  _ members.”

“That’s one way of putting it, yeah.”

Whirl swings his legs over the arm of the couch, laying out flat. The ceiling of Rung’s office is chipped in places, like little constellations of structural decay. His apartment’s like that, too. It’s almost homey. 

“I was thinking about what you said - applying here.”   
“Oh?”   
“ _ Thinking,  _ doc, don’t get all excited,” Whirl says. He almost reaches up to untie his pigtail, stops, bites down on his lip. 

_ Something of meaning to say, something out of the very core of him that’s true and real for once in his fucking life. _

“There’s a community college up the road, y’know. I think maybe that’s more my speed. Cheaper, too, I guess.”

Whirl doesn’t need to look at Rung to know he’s beaming with those blue eyes behind his glasses, trying to fight a smile. For once it doesn’t tick him off.

“I think that’s an excellent idea, Whirl.”

 

x

 

(He’d seen that once before, remember?)

(Polyhex is a tiny town, quiet. Only has one jail cell for the sheriff’s office. 

Whirl’s spitting up blood and trying to determine whether his fingers are broken at the knuckle or just bruised when the door at the opposite end of the room opens back up. One of Impactor’s deputies, Springarm or something - a transfer from the county seat - gestures someone forward. 

Whirl feels a string of red-pink drool condense at his lip and fall to the floor. One of his teeth are chipped. 

The new person’s big, bigger than even Whirl, built like a fucking lumberjack. They look worried. Springarm’s cuffed them. Funny, they never thought to cuff Whirl. 

Springarm pops open the cell door, takes one look at Whirl with the kind of deadeyed stare that only cops have, and closes it behind his new cellmate. 

Bruised knuckles, nothing broken. Sprained wrist, maybe. 

Now this new person’s looking at Whirl with a growing concern as Springarm shuts the door behind himself. 

“Are you alright?” The cuffed one says, “I was at the bar earlier, you got hit - “   
“You gonna fuckin’ shut up?” Whirl asks, and rises. He flexes his neck and feels the throbbing pain in one of his temples expand over his bad eye. It takes him a second, but he’s able to curl his fingers back in to dig at his palms. 

_ Thick black slide.  _ Funny, he thinks.  _ Polyhex limbo.  _ Different ways of saying the same thing.

Whirl turns sharply and drives a fist into the bone above the new one’s eye. He hears something crunch and bares his teeth. 

The door doesn’t open again.)

 

x

 

Whirl wakes up panting, heart in the back of his mouth pulsing against his tongue. He thrashes against the sheet tangling his legs and just barely manages to tip over the edge of his bed before he throws up, arms braced to either side, teeth leaking out of his head. 

Stomach acid sticks to the back of his throat. The hole where his eye used to be itches and burns, and his hands feel scratched raw as they shake. Sweat pools behind his ears. 

“ _ Fuck, fuck,” _ he coughs out. After a second the his legs slip out from the sheet and he’s able to topple over onto the floor and lay face-up to catch his breath. He covers his face with his hands. 

_ Stupid motherfucker, Jesus Christ, all that fucking time and money dumped into Rung’s lap and you’re  _ still - 

He gets back up onto his knees and falls backward to sit against the flat edge of his bed. It’s almost dawn outside, just barely light. 

“Still a fucking mess,” he says. He winces and swallows against a throatful of acid washing up against his tongue. 

After an hour he picks up his phone and calls the first number in his recents. 

“Hm? ‘S going on, Whirl?”

“You mind coming over?”

“It’s like four in the mornin’.”

“Yeah.”

“‘Lright, yeah. Gimme like, ten? You wan’ me to bring Cy?”

Whirl can’t find it in him to smile at the nickname - he’s still shaking.  _ Stupid, stupid, stop it. _

“Yeah. No. Whatever. Just - please come here.”   
“Whirl,” Tailgate says, “are you okay?”

“Not - “ Whirl blinks. His apartment is silent. It’s still barely dawn, he wasn’t imagining it, the sky soft blue, still waking up. 

“Not really.”

“Don’t do anything, okay? Just sit tight, we’ll be right over.  _ Cy, Cyclonus, up up up.  _ I can keep talking to you, if you want.”

“No, ‘sokay,” Whirl says, and hangs up. His phone falls to the floor, but he can’t be bothered to pick it up, to see if the screen cracked as he dropped it.

(It was dawn when he tried leaving Polyhex, remember?)   
(Remember?)   
  


x

 

(He remembers how it felt, having his eye taken out. Didn’t hurt as much as you’d think. Hurt worse. It wouldn’t stop bleeding.

_ Accident, fell on a branch in the woods, clumsy fuckin’ kid, scared the shit out of us. _

He remembers when his hands were whole. He was good with ‘em, too. That’s the shitty part. He was really into clocks as a kid. He could build ‘em, even. Spent hours tinkering with scraps from the autobody in town. For a month he couldn’t move his fingers.

_ Accident, crushed ‘em under the car, wanted to go for a joyride. Fuckin’ kid, right? _

Right?

Cried like a wounded animal, didn’t you? Cried and yelled and tried to dig up some kind of strength, some will to defend yourself, but couldn’t. Couldn’t, and took it. Just kept fucking taking it as you were ripped apart.)

 

x

 

(When he dreams, he sees through both eyes. A little trivia for you.)

 

x

 

Cyclonus and Tailgate show up at his doorstep with an extra blanket and Tailgate’s laptop. They’re both wearing about a million layers, and it’s only when Whirl sees them that he realizes it’s fucking  _ freezing  _ in his apartment. 

“Cyclonus just got back from work - he might pass out on you, been a long night,” Tailgate says when Whirl opens the door. 

“Sorry,” he says.

“You asked for help,” Cyclonus says simply, and crosses to Whirl’s bed without another word. He makes a little  _ huff  _ sound as he connects and immediately falls back against the pillows. If he could feel his face Whirl might’ve smiled.

Tailgate looks tired, too, but bright with worry.

“How’re you doing?” They ask.

Whirl shrugs and closes the door after them. 

“Don’t really know.”

Cyclonus cracks an eye open at him, “Can you sleep?”

Whirl shakes his head. He watches as Tailgate crosses the floor to plug their laptop in, sets it up on the foot of the bed, hoists themself to sit on the other side of the bed.

“Wifi from the pizza place next door,” Whirl supplies without thinking about it. He doesn’t know if he can move, or what to move toward. 

“What do you need?” Cyclonus asks, and after a pause, “and don’t be stupid.”   
“ _ Cyclonus!  _ So rude.”

Whirl thinks about it.  _ Don’t be stupid.  _

_ I need something from you, Whirl,  _ Rung says,  _ in order to help you. I’m not a mind-reader. Start with the easiest thing you can say, if it helps.  _

“Had a bad dream,” Whirl says, trying to condence his words down, little waves of words instead of one big riptide. His body feels bone-tired, aching with it, but he’s not really aware of it.

“Thought I was gonna die. Just. Just wanna make sure I’m not gonna die.”

Cyclonus sits up and pulls his legs alongside him. Tailgate lays out on their stomach and puts their chin in their palms.

“You’re not gonna die, Whirl. Promise,” Tailgate says gently. 

“Sit,” Cyclonus tilts his head toward the space between them. Perfectly Whirl-shaped, on his own bed. Sleep tugs at his eye.

“We can watch Thor Ragnarok if you want, or Fullmetal Alchemist!” Tailgate says. 

Cyclonus cuts them the sharpest look Whirl’s ever seen. Tailgate’s eyes go big. 

“Um.”

Whirl blinks. His body feels like it’s underwater. 

And then he starts laughing.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean - “ Tailgate’s babbling. Cyclonus sighs. 

Whirl laughs until it’s hard to breathe, and then just stops breathing all together. Feeling snaps back into his body like a fastball pitch. He hurts  _ so much,  _ his chest tight with it, a deep loathing ache behind his bad eye and the palms of his hands, throat scraped raw, something heavy and  _ sad  _ in his lungs. 

“It’s fine, short change, really,” he says, and flops down between the two of them. Tailgate tosses him the blanket they brought. Cyclonus shifts and offers him one of the pillows behind his back. Whirl’s uncomfortably aware that their shoulders are touching. 

“I’ll just put on something else,” they say in a tiny voice. 

They end up putting on one of the Star Wars prequels - Cyclonus goes “ugh” under his breath and Tailgate looks at him aghast.    
“I  _ like  _ this movie!”

Whirl rolls his good eye, and then Tailgate flips themself around to sit upright and after a beat flops themself against his side.

Whirl doesn’t move. They’re so fucking  _ warm.  _ Little goddamn furnace.

“Okay?” They murmur after a second.

“Mm-hm,” Whirl mumbles. He knows if he looks away from the screen at either of them he’ll combust. 

_ Not a bad way to die,  _ he thinks, then tells himself to shut the fuck up.

 

x

 

(Halfway through the movie, Cyclonus shifts until his back faces the wall. Tailgate’s softly snoring with their head just below Whirl’s ribcage. He’s never been this warm in his life.

“Better now?” Cyclonus asks. Whirl shivers. He bites down on his tongue and nods.

“Good. Go to sleep.”)

 

x

 

Netflix is rolling the credits to Rouge One by the time Whirl wakes up. Tailgate’s on their phone beside him, sitting up with a blanket still wrapped halfway around their shoulders. It’s bright outside. 

“Cyclonus had to go to class,” Tailgate says quietly when he moves. He realizes why his left side feels cold.

“Time’s it?”

“Noon-ish. I don’t have class til two, you can go back to sleep if you want.”

“Nn,” Whirl says, and sits up. Almost nine hours - it’s the longest he’s slept in months. 

“Feeling okay?” Tailgate asks as Whirl stretches. 

The ache behind his eye is gone, and besides the dry throat and disgusting taste in his mouth, nothing hurts. His hands are stiff, but that’s nothing new.

“‘Mfine. Thanks, for coming over.”   
“Yeah, of course,” Tailgate says, trailing off as something catches their eye. They pick up the little half-dissassembled alarm clock on the side table and turn it in their hands. “What happened to this little guy?”

Whirl takes it from them, careful of the exposed backing, and taps the display. Tailgate leans over to see.

“Just old. I need to replace the lights, tighten a few things.”   
“You know how to do that?” Tailgate says, an odd quiet to it. 

Whirl shrugs, “Not much to know. I used to work on analogs, too - “ 

(Remember?)   
He stops, places the clock in his lap. It flashes a default  _ 12:00  _ at him.

Tailgate looks at him.

“Where’d you learn that?”

“Picked it up myself, always liked things that ticked.”   
_ Stop talking about it.  _

Tailgate leans and takes back the clock. Holds it between them.  _ 12:00.  _ Right in the middle, noon and midnight. 

“Think you could show me how?”   
“To fix a clock? Why’d you wanna know that?”

_ Please.  _

“I wanna see you put it back together.”

Their hands are so  _ small.  _

Whirl looks up and watches Tailgate’s wide clear glasses blink black a reflected  _ 12:00  _ at him. Panic rips through him.

“Don’t,” he says, and it trips through his throat until he’s not even sure he’s said it out loud.

“Okay,” they say. And they lean away.

“D’you wanna go get lunch?” They ask. 

Whirl feels like he’s just run a marathon. His heart pushes against his diaphragm. 

“Yeah, sure.”

 

x

 

(They ever tell you how to get out of the Polyhex limbo? How to stop playing?

No, of course not.

That’s something you figure out yourself.)

 

x

 

They get Mexican food from a place just off of campus, and Whirl walks them back to their class after. They wave, pause as if thinking about something, and turn away. Whirl stuffs his hands into his pockets, rounds the corner of the building, and immediately pulls out his phone and dials.

“You’ve literally never called me before. Are you dying?”

“No, but I might be fucked. Really fucked.” 

Whirl frowns.

“Why would you think I was dying?”

“Dunno, people seem to call me when they’re having a breakdown. No idea why.”

“No kidding.”   
“So you’re fucked?”   
“Never been as fucked, probably. Mind if I crash whatever it is you’re doing?”

“Playing DnD with Chromedome, Rewind, and Nautica.”

Whirl chokes, stops in the middle of the crosswalk. He flips off the car that honks at him and picks back up across the street.

“You’re playing  _ Dungeons and Dragons?” _

“With Chromedome, Rewind, and Nautica, yeah. You know where their dorm is?”

“Think so. See you in thirty, you  _ huge  _ fucking nerd.”

 

x

 

Brainstorm lets him in when he shows up. Chromedome doesn’t look too happy that he’s crashed their… whatever it is,  _ nerd session _ , and neither does Rewind, but Whirl’s only marginally interested.

“Scale of one to ten, rank your fucked level,” Brainstorm says, leaning out of the doorframe and peering at him. They’re wearing three watches - one on one wrist, two on the other - and a shirt with the  _ NASA  _ logo with tiny Buzz Aldrins where the stars should be. 

“Twelve,” Whirl says immediately. 

Brainstorm’s eyes widen, “Damn, you better come in.”

“Session’s paused, there’s a crisis,” they say.

“You say that every session,” Rewind replies from where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, “which is why we stopped inviting you.”

“Also because you kept making characters that time-traveled,” a person Whirl doesn’t know says from a beanbag chair. Their hair’s pulled back into a thick brown ponytail, and a pencil sticks out from behind one ear. He vaguely recognizes them as the foosball champion from a few weeks ago. Nautica, probably.

“This time the crisis isn’t mine!” Brainstorm says defensively. They gesture to Whirl, “Whirl’s fucked.”

“What else is new?” Chromedome says, sitting backwards in a chair with his chin in one hand.

“You four know Cyclonus and Tailgate better than I do,” Whirl says, cutting through, “and I think they might be plotting to kill me. That sound like something they’d do?”

“Cyclonus maybe, if you really pissed him off. Tailgate definitely, but not seriously,” Rewind says. 

Chromedome narrows his eyes. “What’d you  _ do?”  _ He asks.

“I didn’t  _ do  _ anything! They’re just acting fucking weird! I mean, I think. I have no idea.”

“Cyclonus doesn’t act weird,” Nautica says, “but Tailgate might. Anything in particular?”   
“How are we talking about this?” Chromedome asks.

“I don’t know, they’re being nice? Too nice? They look at me a lot? Really close, all the time?”

The room goes silent for about a full minute.

“I thought you said this was a twelve,” Brainstorm says, aghast.

“It  _ is  _ a twelve,” Whirl says, “I don’t fucking like it! How do I get them to stop?”

Chromedome bursts into laughter. After a second, Nautica joins him, although they have the courtesy to hide it behind a hand. 

“Oh my  _ god,”  _ Rewind giggles. 

“Whirl, can you - uh. Can you leave the room for a second?” Brainstorm asks. 

“No, no, I got it. Let me get this,” Chromedome says. He stands and holds the door open for Whirl. His skin feels like it’s on fire. He wants to run six miles directly into midday traffic and then bury himself beneath the wash until summer. 

Chromedome closes the door behind them and leans up against it. He runs a hand through his hair until it pulls away from his eyes. For a second he just  _ looks  _ at Whirl, sharp hazel eyes.

“I’m gonna need you to not punch me when I say this,” he says. Whirl’s teeths lot together.

“No promises.”

Chromedome holds out his hands, flat. 

“You ever like anyone, Whirl? A lot?”

“The  _ fuck  _ does that have to do with - “   
Chromedome sighs.   
“They like you. Cyclonus  _ tolerates  _ people, Tailgate  _ loves  _ them. It works out okay between the two of them. But they both seem to like you, for some reason.”

Whirl curls in his fingers until he can feel his nails digging hard into the spaces between the tendons in his palms.

“Listen, okay, I truly could not care less what goes on between the three of you - but here’s the thing. When I first met Rewind, I’d tease him - not a lot, but whenever he got too into his work. He’d give me pictures he took. We figured each other out. People don’t show or respond to affection the same way. You have to figure out Cyclonus and Tailgate’s ways on your own. And I swear to God if I ever have to give you emotional advice again I’ll get campus police to throw you off my campus.”

He ducks back behind the door before Whirl can open his mouth to spit something back.

_ Huh.  _

 

x

 

_ (Don’t be stupid.) _

 

_ (I wanna see you put it back together.) _

 

x

 

He texts both of them on the way back to his apartment.

_ we didn’t finish the movie - we can, if you want  _

_ pizza place next door is actually pretty good _

 

x

 

“So I have friends now,” Whirl says conversationally. It feels like being punched in the gut anyway.

“That’s good,” Rung replies. He’s wearing some new hideous tweed, a pale orange jacket. Sometimes Whirl really wishes he didn’t have to see him on a biweekly basis, just to be spared the tweed.

“I don’t think I’ve had many  _ friends,”  _ Whirl says. He laces his fingers together, then back apart, studies his nails.

“What about in Polyhex? You knew people at school, people in town.”

“Nah, not really friends. I used to hang out with the Wreckers a lot, but they were just... Polyhex’s prized washouts,I guess.”   
“You mentioned,” Rung says, a careful note in his voice, “So what about being here makes it different, do you think?”

“I like people here,” Whirl says. And it’s just. True. An easy truth, one he didn’t even know he had in him until it was said. Nothing he had to scrape together or pull out from deep within himself. 

Rung raises an eyebrow.

Brainstorm, Cyclonus, Tailgate, Rung, Chromedome, Rewind, even people he knew peripherally, Rodimus, Nautica,  _ Swerve.  _ All of them were weird, maladapted in some way, but not completely falling apart. Not caught in some kind of fucked limbo scraping knuckles raw trying to escape it. All of them were like him, but not enough, and that was  _ good.  _ Brainstorm was a supernova of really shitty ideas but with the hyperactive genius to pull them off; Cyclonus had ice for blood but he was  _ perceptive  _ and knew how to use that; Tailgate locked on to whatever was too much for them and raced toward it with an exuberant  _ joy;  _ Rung could rip him apart to fix him but chose to be kind instead; Chromedome was a sarcastic bastard but what he loved he loved completely. And Whirl had slipped into their group almost seamlessly. 

And they’d all just let him. 

 

x

 

(You have to figure out how to get out of the limbo yourself. 

It takes a while, it always does. To pull yourself out of something like that. 

But it tends to go a lot faster if you have help.)

 

x

 

Tailgate and Cyclonus appear back in Whirl’s doorway a few days later. 

“You need to decorate more! This place feels so empty,” Tailgate says. They sprawl out on the bed but still only manage to take up half. They’re wearing a big baby blue hoodie - they look like they belong there, swallowed up by pillows and curled around a blanket. Their hair is soft and loose today, like a cloud.

Cyclonus doesn’t look too happy with the idea of watching more shitty 90’s movies, but places the pizza boxes in his arms down on the coffee table Whirl had pulled over.

He pops his laptop open and lets Tailgate sign in.   
“No idea what I’d do with it, really.”

Tailgate bites their lip and looks around the room critically. 

“We’ll go look for posters later,” they decide.

Whirl sits between them and turns the volume up. Tailgate passes out pizza on little paper plates. He waits.

Thirty minutes in, Tailgate leans against Whirl. There’s no hesitation in his mind when he puts an arm across their back to hold them there. Next to him, he can hear Cyclonus breathe a little slower, and when he shifts to turn toward them both, Whirl leans back.

 


	5. v

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It works.  
> It’s… nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, it's been a grip!
> 
> muse(ic) is purple yellow red and blue by portugal. the man  
> enjoy, and i love you!
> 
> \- p
> 
> obligatory warning label (part five) : reoccurring mentions of self-destructive behavior, depression, themes of struggling with and working through trauma, physical violence, mentions of past abuse

 

**v.**

 

x

 

It’s kind of a routine.

On Mondays Whirl walks to Rung’s office in the morning. He leaves around the time Brainstorm’s intern group scatters, so they go get coffee and make fun of what the other orders.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays Whirl walks Tailgate to their 2pm, then hangs out over at Hadeen with whatever member of the DL club has the afternoon off.

Wednesdays Whirl goes with Cyclonus to practice and tries to convince himself fencing is a very serious, real sport, but usually just gets bored and steals the receptionist’s book or something.

Thursday nights are DL meetings at the usual cafe.

Friday after seeing Rung, Brainstorm lets Whirl tag along to DnD although he’ll never, ever play, and then he gets dinner with Tailgate or Cyclonus.

It works.

It’s… nice.

 

x

 

(Polyhex is a desert town. Desert towns are all the same - the same kind of houses, the same semi-abandoned gas stations selling cheap beer in their chillers, the same endless lonely roads bracketed by steel girders, overpasses that run over shallow ditches where flood water pools. Desert towns are sun-parched, dizzy, caged animals tortured by the heat. Desert towns are angry, angry in a bones-deep way, a way Whirl knows well. They _take._

Polyhex drains something out of you, over time. It saps something deep within you and it makes you angry that it does this, angry that you can't fight back.

Whirl's a desert town.)

 

x

 

It's a Wednesday night, and Whirl picks a fight.

This is the longest he's kept a gig - two and a half months bouncing at a bar two blocks away from his apartment, the kind of bar people dive into wanting to ruin their entire fucking lives with liquor, the kind of place you go to when you have nowhere to be in the morning. He's gotten good at it, too, winking at the regulars and blocking most of the potential troublemakers by lifting one hand to brush his bangs back from his bad eye. He even kind of likes the shitty old rock music they pump through the speakers behind the bar.

But tonight's different - it's almost acidic, short-circuited by the tense energy he's keeping locked up behind his ribs these days. Cyclonus is at practice this late, and Tailgate's probably writing a paper back at their apartment, and for some reason, tonight of all nights, that makes Whirl _ache._ It's been weeks since he's done something teeth-breakingly stupid, and he can feel it, and there's no one around to stop him. His complex schedule of tag-in-tag-out to keep him around someone, anyone, to keep from being alone for more than a few hours, because he knows what this feeling is.

Thick black slide.

The next person who walks up Whirl decks. He doesn't say anything, nothing smart-and-stupid like he usually does, nothing taunting, the way he used to to pick fights with Impactor, the way he did with Fort Max. He thinks for a split second of Cyclonus, the clear, concise way he threw a punch, the absolute nothing on his face that night in front of Maccadam's.

This guy's big, much bigger than Whirl, and about as tall, able to look him square in the eye as he reels with the blow. There's blood on his chin and down the side of his jaw where his lip's been split open. For a single, dizzying moment through the flash of high-octane adrenaline Whirl thinks - _what if he's got a gun, what if he's a fucking_ cop - and laughs, a short, hollow noise. He's fucked anyway, probably.

The first hit he takes, he feels his nose crack with the force. _Shit._

He doesn't get his arms up in time and the guy grabs the collar of his jacket to drag him bodily into the next blow that lands squarely over his bad eye. Whirl spits an "Oh, _fuck you,"_ at him before kneeing him in the stomach, taking the time to shake the ache out of his knuckles before bringing his fist down over his bent head as he doubles over.

It doesn't take long after that.

 

x

 

(He ever tell you how he got thrown out of the Wreckers?

Yeah, me neither.)

 

x

 

He'd said it once, remember - fist fights, brutalization, beating the shit out of people until they don’t fight back anymore.

Polyhex is a desert town. It chews you up and spits you out.

 

x

 

Whirl spits blood into the sink back home somewhere around one AM. The proprietor of the bar had thrown him out after the yelling had started, threatening to call the cops if he ever came back, but it still took him a good ten minutes leaned against the brick back wall to catch his breath, and another five to stop shaking, before he could walk back home.

They're gonna kill me, he thinks. The little mirror hung over the sink doesn't quite capture his reflection in the dark, but Whirl doesn't need to see himself to know it's gruesome. He can feel the bruises beginning over the bridge of his nose and across his temple toward his brow bone. He can feel the dull, throbbing pain over his bad eye and the stiffness in his hands. They're gonna kill me and then bring me back to life Fullmetal Alchemist style so they can kill me again.

 _(No_ , a little voice in the back of Whirl's head says, one he hasn't heard in a while, _they're gonna take one look at you and know exactly what happened. And you'll see it on their faces, their disappointment, their pity because you can't keep yourself together, their frustration because they picked you of all people, and that was a mistake. You know exactly what happens after this.)_

He narrowly resists shattering the mirror, if only because his hands are fucked up enough as it is.

 

x

 

He doesn't get up the next morning. He's not missing anything, really, but can't seem to fall asleep for more than a couple of hours so he just sits in bed on his phone, too tired to do much but refresh the same websites over and over and wait for it to be dark outside again.

(Time doesn't really exist much in desert towns - months last weeks and years stretch on indefinitely into the horizon. Every day is the same cloudless pink sunrise and cloudless orange sunset.)

Brainstorm texts him a few times, but he deletes the messages without really reading them, and rolls back over to try to force himself to sleep.

It'll take a week or so for the bruises to heal over, Whirl tells himself, I can just tell them I'm sick. It's not like I've got anywhere to be, not really - the DL club's not gonna notice if I don't show up, and I'm pretty sure Chromedome and Rewind would be glad to have me off their fucking back for once.

Rung's gonna kick my ass though, he realizes, and winces.

 

x

 

It's a close thing, Rung not kicking his ass. It's probably only the Hippocratic oath stopping him from beating Whirl over the head with one of his model ships, and come to think of it, he has no idea if Rung had to take the oath.

"So, let me make sure I've understood this - " He says, in a voice so sharp Whirl flinches away from it, "Because it is, after all, nearly incomprehensible. You assaulted someone while at work."

"Jesus, doc, when you put it like that - "

"What way would you like me to put it?" Rung asks, taking off his glasses to polish them against a sleeve of his cardigan. It's a nervous habit, something he does when he gets agitated. Whirl's almost proud of himself for recognizing it.

"You picked a fight, Whirl. You explicitly sought out a stranger to beat up, because - _well_ , I don't believe there was a because, was there?"

Whirl scowls. His hands fidget as he leans forward and rests his arms against his knees.

"I'm sorry, I know shaming you isn't an effective way to get you to change your behavior. I'm just, frustrated, Whirl. You've been doing some very hard work to recover, and I don't like to see you relapse like this."

"For fuck's sake, doc, I'm not an alcoholic - I'm not fuckin' _relapsing_ , I just did something stupid again. It's par for the course, really."

"Did you want to hurt someone else, or yourself?" Rung asks.

"What?"

Rung pinches the bridge of his nose briefly before putting his glasses back on and leaning away.

"When you decided you wanted a fight, was it because you wanted to hurt someone else, or because you wanted to hurt yourself?"

Whirl looks away. After a second he lays down on the couch and kicks his legs up. The question makes him angry, almost.

"I don't fuckin' know. I guess both. I wasn't really thinking of my motivation, doc. It's just something I decided to do."

"And how did you feel after?"

Whirl bites down on his lip, hard. The pain is familiar.

"Scared."

"About what?"

"I don't wanna tell you that," Whirl says, staring straight up at the ceiling. There's a weight on his chest that he can't seem to get rid of, lying down, sitting up. It pushes down against his sternum, right over where's he's keeping all those restless bad decisions. He can't remember when that started.

"You don't have to," Rung says quietly, "but I think it would help."

Whirl picks up his jacket off the arm of the couch, puts it on, and leaves.

 

x

 

(You think you’re low enough, lower than you’ve ever been, that any shift in the bar feels like a godsend, like improvement, even if it’s microscopic, even if it’s just settling into place.

And you never know how low it gets, not really, not until it drops again, and however low you thought it went, at least you know it can get worse.)

 

x

 

Tailgate tries to call him an hour later. Whirl lets it go to voicemail, takes a detour downtown, and heads straight for the overpass.

It's been a while, he thinks, and no time at all. A few weeks, maybe.

He stands under it, dead-center, and thinks of the asphalt above, the metric tonnage of the structure itself. It could crush him instantly. He's already tasted the gravel, once, that night when everything ended.

"I was scared," Whirl says, little chunks of words from a slowly closing throat. Small bits of truth, like air in a draft.

"I was scared. That they'd all leave."

He can feel himself breathing - long, slow breaths that condense in the air in front of him. It's the same clear, silent air from that morning when he buried Springer's baseball bat. Kingdom of one, and all that. Maybe that wasn't a good thing, after all.

"They'd all leave. And I'd have nothing again."

 

x

 

“I thought we’d resolved this already,” Whirl hears a long, long time later. It's dark, or it has been for a while, or it just settled into night - he’s lost track of time, so universal and uniform settling over his head that he’d almost forgotten about it. The wash is empty, like always, nothing but loose sand and asphalt for miles, the rumble of trucks passing overhead every now and again like an out of tune heartbeat. _Broken clock_ \- he doesn't like thinking about it.

"Did you at least win?" Cyclonus asks.

Whirl laughs, not because he wants to. Yeah, Cyclonus was definitely a desert town once.

"No, I don't think so. I think I lost pretty fucking badly, actually."

A truck passes by overhead. It rattles the foundation of the overpass, all thick dry stone shivering like a leaf. If this thing fell down around us right now, Whirl asks himself, would it hurt?

He's not sure if he wants the answer to that question to be yes or no.

After half an hour, an hour, two, three, who knows, Cyclonus straightens and looks down over him.

"Come on, Tailgate's been worried. You can explain this to them yourself."

Whirl winces. "Why?"

“Because the alternative is letting you suffer.”

 

x

 

Tailgate doesn't say anything at first, just grabs one of those frozen bags of mixed vegetables from the kitchenette and brings it over. They look at Whirl with hard grey-blue eyes when he takes it and turn away, closing the door to their and Cyclonus' bedroom so quietly it makes Whirl flinch.

Cyclonus goes to the flattop and pulls a few mugs from the cabinet to make tea.

Fullmetal Alchemist style, Whirl's brain supplies, inanely.

Whirl watches Cyclonus, waiting, until Tailgate bangs open the door again. They march directly up to him, look him square in the eye, and slap his arm.

Whirl flinches - they're stronger than he'd thought, being literally the smallest person he'd ever seen.

"Sorry," he mumbles.

"You should be," Tailgate says, still not a flash of cruelty in their voice anywhere. It's that part that makes Whirl's lungs stick to his ribs for a moment.

"We talked about it," Cyclonus says, his movements controlled and slow as he takes the tea bags out of two of the mugs and tosses them, offering one to Tailgate. They take it, narrowing their eyes.

"You mean you said he was being stupid and he told you to fuck off, right?"

Whirl shrugs. "More or less." He takes the tea Cyclonus gives him but doesn't drink it. It's the gesture, he thinks. You fucked up, but I'll still make you tea, so we're okay. Probably.

Tailgate shakes their head. "You're both ridiculous. I'm taking a nap."

 

x

 

("What did you learn?" Rung asks, later.

A few months ago, maybe, Whirl would have said "nothing," and changed the topic. He would've said "not a fucking thing, doc", and left, or laid back against the couch and stayed silent for the rest of the hour. He would've laughed - me, learn something? Can't teach a fucked up dog new tricks. Sat and watched his hands, the way they don't exactly lay straight anymore, always half-curled towards something like fists.

What did you learn?)

 

x

 

_(Why are you here?_

_What do you want?_

_What did you learn?_

Funny, how different questions can have the same answer.)

 

x

 

The Down Low Club's charter gets rejected.

Whirl leans back in his booth, arms slung out horizontally over the top, and sucks in air through his teeth. Well.

Rodimus is the only one in the room who doesn't look put out by the news - and from what Whirl's experienced hanging around the DL Club the past few weeks; yeah, that's pretty much par for the course.

Drift, Roddy's second, breaks the news as soon as all of them have packed into Maccadam's. Swerve orders drinks for their table - Whirl, Cyclonus, Tailgate, and Swerve's boyfriend Skids (" _Seriously_ , I swear to Christ - " "Don't be _rude_ , Whirl"). Tailgate and Swerve take turns blowing the paper wrappers of their straws at each other until Magnus - the big one perpetually wearing suits - quiets everyone down and Drift steps forward. They fence, Whirl knows, but unlike Cyclonus is actually on the university's team. He's seen them step onto the strip a couple times, but they never ask Cyclonus to practice with them. Whirl thinks maybe that's for the best, but what does he know? Jocks with swords - the nerdiest of all sports.

"Alright, so. We didn't get approved."

Drift waits for the wave of groans to pass. Cyclonus doesn't seem to react to the news, no shit, but Tailgate kind of slumps. Whirl drops his arm a little so it rests against their shoulders.

Rodimus, sitting on a stool behind them and kicking his legs, shrugs.

"Then we try again."

Magnus looks over at him.

"Rodimus, the charter was rejected."

"Then we rewrite the charter!" Rodimus says, and although he's smiling, Whirl can feel the canine bite to the words in the pit of his stomach. It occurs to him that Rodimus might be the most upset out of everyone here. Whirl remembers that rumor he heard from Brainstorm, about Rodimus setting the gym on fire his first year. Firestarter's got a temper, he thinks.

"We rewrite, we re-submit, we do whatever it takes! Lambda Lambda has enough members, and it sure as fuck has enough motivation. We'll pull this off."

"Here here!" Swerve says, and raises his coffee. Whirl rolls his eye.

Magnus frowns. "I'm sorry, but Optimus and Megatron were very clear about - "

Whirl is outside before he realizes he's moved.

It's not nearly as cold out as he wants it to be, cold like the inside of his lungs, cold like freezer burn.

_(Remember?)_

(“Are you alright? I was at the bar earlier, you got hit - “)

("Oh, him? That's nobody you gotta worry about, kid. Just Megatron - used to work in the mines up east. The fuck did you do to him, by the way?")

Whirl feels his teeth slide into place. If he thinks about it long enough, he can remember the way the blood tasted in his mouth when he threw that first swing. He bites down on the meat of his tongue, hard enough to taste nickel and copper. Yeah, like that.

Whirl sits at the curb and watches the stop lights change to traffic that isn't there. Red, yellow, green.

Belonging in places he didn't belong, didn't he say? Well, looks like someone beat him to it.

 

x

 

_(Remember?)_

Polyhex is a desert town, built small against the sand and the mountains. It's an angry place, a place that takes from you, slowly, over time. The only thing you can do to defend yourself is be angry back, maybe, try to keep it from draining you out with your rage and your black tar bad decisions - that's Whirl's strategy.

Megatron wasn't like that - "Are you alright? I was at the bar earlier - ". Stupid. Water in a desert.

Maybe that's what did it. Maybe it was the heat-imprint of Impactor's fist on his jaw, on his ribs. Maybe it was his eye, his hands, the broken bat buried in soft soil miles away. Maybe Whirl's just a fucking black hole, a desert town himself, sucking it all in until it bursts through his skin. Rung might know, but Whirl's never told him.

You don't pick when the limbo starts, when it ends, when the bar is raised or lowered or by how much. All you do is survive it, and survive it, and -

Whirl's only lost three fights.

 

x

 

"Whirl!"

Whirl scuffs the tip of his boot against the asphalt. He thinks he should go home, but he can't make his body get up. And what would he do then? Sit in the silence, under the covers, like a kid scared of the monster under the bed - no such thing as monsters, and if there were, they sure as fuck wouldn't hide under beds.

"Whirl," Tailgate is saying, moving closer to put their hand on his shoulder and sit down next to him.

"What's going on? Are you okay?"

"Nah, short change, not really," He hears himself say - weird, he would've shrugged Tailgate's hand off his shoulder not a month ago. Would've told him to fuck off two weeks ago. Rung, Brainstorm, Tailgate, Cyclonus - he doesn't like that they're all under his skin like this, worming around and making him feel things, do things, say things. Monsters under the bed.

"Who's Megatron?"

(" - used to work in the mines up east - ")

"He teaches political theory. Our dean assigned him to be the overseer for the fraternity," Cyclonus says at his other shoulder. He hasn't sat down, just put his hands into his pockets, watching the stoplights with him. "He's not a good person."

"Yeah," Whirl says, the sound breaking in his chest, "Met him once."

Cyclonus look at him - one thing about Cyclonus: he never looks away.

("The fuck did you do to him, by the way?")

"Meeting's over, anyway," Tailgate says quietly, "Wanna go home?"

Whirl blinks. His fingers twitch, settling a little straighter against his legs.

Some people get out of the Polyhex limbo, he thinks - some don't. Guess it's a matter of perspective.

_(Don't be stupid.)_

_(I wanna see you put it back together.)_

"Yeah," he says, "okay. Let's go home."


	6. vi

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (“You ever like anyone, Whirl? A lot?”)  
> Huh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, here we are!   
> i started this almost a year ago (give or take like two months), and i'm a completely different person in a completely different place than i was back then - the way this story ends i hope reflects that.  
> anyway, thanks so much for all the love you've given this! it's still so cool after all this time to know people actually read + enjoy this.  
> so, once again, enjoy! and i love you!
> 
> muse(ic) is hazey (stripped) by glass animals
> 
> \- p

 

**vi**

 

x

 

Whirl follows the two of them back to their apartment - it's quiet at night, not silent like that night after the overpass, but the cars passing through have slowed to a trickle and the last few undergrads are heading back to the dorms for the night to get high, write essays, watch cartoons from their childhood to reminisce about the late 90s, whatever. Tailgate takes over the talking when they realize that neither Whirl or Cyclonus are going to do it.

"Wonder how Roddy's gonna have Drift re-write the charter?" They ask, tilting their head back to catch the breeze that cuts right through Whirl. The only thing worse than the desert heat, maybe, is the desert cold - it’s the kind of thing that sticks in you, congeals around your bones. You carry it with you.

"He's the fraternity president," Cyclonus rumbles, hands stuck in his pockets, "he should write it himself."

Tailgate snorts like the idea is funny. Whirl scuffs a boot on the concrete.

"Yeah, but you know how Rodimus is. Drift's always been better with the grand poetic speeches and stuff, Roddy's just better at delivering 'em."

"Theater kid," Whirl snorts. Cyclonus hums, and if Whirl didn't know any better, he'd almost consider that a laugh. He wonders if he can laugh, what that would sound like - probably something like a fucking church bell, the kind of laugh that moves  _ through  _ you. He feels warm suddenly and shakes his head to get some air moving into his lungs. 

"The community theater's putting on Kinky Boots this year, he should try out!" Tailgate says, with all the earnest excitement dripping from their thousand watt smile that it makes Whirl laugh, a sound that finally, finally feels clear - not smoke-charred or acidic or caught in his throat, nothing beaten or ripped or shoved out of him. 

"Yeah, short change, he definitely should," he replies, and they walk.

 

x

 

Cyclonus makes them tea again, two strong mugs that he lets sit a little longer, and Tailgate's faintly fragrant one that smells like pressed flowers. Whirl doesn't like tea, but he takes the cup Cyclonus hands him anyway and lets it warm his fingers. Somewhere in the pillar of his throat he's still achingly cold, and it takes the numbing edge off, just a little. 

Cyclonus sits next to him and immediately cracks open the biggest textbook Whirl's ever seen to read, an honest to god pen and notepad at his elbow to take notes every other paragraph. It's something intensely nerdy and dry, a lingual history of the movements of indigenous people across North America that Whirl tunes out as soon as his eye finds it. On his other side Tailgate curls up with their little baby blue DS to play Pokemon, and Whirl watches until he realizes Tailgate's team is stacked pretty much exclusively with psychic and water types, and he gets bored again. He likes the fire and electric type designs - Twin Twist used to play it sometimes at the sheriff's office, leaning too far back in his chair and hissing at his screen every time he lost a fight, which was every ten minutes. Whirl remembers the day Twist broke the thing, shattered it into a million tiny pieces. He’d gone home with a black eye and a split lip that night, a brutal bright light in his eye.

Whirl starts to doze, a little pang of something warm and sharp behind his bad eye (not tears, he hadn't been able to cry through that eye since - ), when his phone vibrates.

_ you should play dnd with us,  _ Brainstorm says.

Whirl snorts - _ yeah, sure, nerd, and after we can do dramatic readings of tolkien and go larping! _

_ tolkien's a bitch and rewind's campaign is set in space, _ Brainstorm replies. 

_ we're the crew of a spaceship trying to find an order of mythical knights to restore our homeworld - chromedome says u shouldn't play, but he's just grumpy _

_ u'd have fun. _

Whirl blinks at the last text, the glare of the screen almost accusatory.

"I'm going to bed," Tailgate says, yawning as they do as if to prove their point, and shuts their DS.

After half a second Cyclonus nods and shuts his book, setting it on the coffee table as he gets up. Whirl looks away as he stretches his back, one hand on his shoulder and the other just over his tailbone, where his shirt hem falls.

"'Night," Whirl mumbles, falling sideways into the space Tailgate leaves and curling his knees up into the hollow below his ribs.

Tailgate looks at Cyclonus, and something important must pass between them as they do, because they clear their throat a little and says quietly, "You could come with us. If you wanted to."

"We've slept in your bed twice now," Cyclonus adds, as though that makes it perfectly reasonable.

Whirl feels himself nearly swallow his own tongue, and his hands curl a little further.

"Why?" He asks, without really meaning to. He has no idea what he wants the answer to be. No idea why he asks it.

Tailgate shrugs, and looks over at Cyclonus again. They have to have a language in significant glances, Whirl thinks faintly. His teeth are plastered to the back of his throat, and he can feel his pulse dull but loud in his tongue.

"Because we want you to."

There's something there, in the back of Whirl's mind, that tugs at that - something that says  _ they want to keep an eye on you, make sure you don't do something  _ else  _ stupid, _ something that says  _ suicide watch  _ with a voice like cigarette smoke and nights spent on top of the jungle gym _ , _ but this is different. This is an incomprehensible kindness, an inclusion into something Whirl wasn't aware he was allowed into.

"Yeah," he says slowly as he sits back up, "but why?"

Cyclonus rolls his eyes and huffs. He crosses back over from their door to the couch and crouches down in front of Whirl, almost but not quite touching him, far enough away like that night on the overpass that either one of them could get away, if they wanted. But Whirl doesn't want to lash out at him this time, and the realization of that in the back of his mind is scary enough that he doesn't move away.  

"Don't be stupid," he says, the sound barely making it out of his chest, low and gentle and not at all how Whirl's heard those words before, so many times before, and in the space between that thought and the next Cyclonus rolls his knuckles across his jaw and pulls his head down into a kiss.

Whirl doesn't move, just lets out a breath that redoubles back over his eyelids and suddenly he's furnace hot, warm in the tips of his fingers, down his shoulders and over the back of his neck where Cyclonus' fingers rest - he's desert hot, scorched with it, dizzy, sun-parched. 

Whirl opens his mouth and tilts his head, half-lidded eye caught on the bright silver flash of the cuff Cyclonus wears over the top of his ear, the one that spirals into a point like a horn. 

"Okay," Whirl says for the second time tonight, ducking his head just enough to feel Cyclonus' next inhale pull at the bridge of his nose, "yeah."

Tailgate laughs, arms crossed, standing on tiptoe halfway across the room. 

_ (“You ever like anyone, Whirl? A lot?”) _

_ Huh. _

Whirl stands a little too quickly and watches kind of detachedly as the room tilts and then rights itself, and he's never hated being tall before, being tall enough to completely tower over Tailgate, never wanted to kneel and see how it feels in the reverse, to have Tailgate stand over him looking like they've never wanted to smile this hard before. They more than make up for it, though, immediately threading their fingers through his almost-but-not-quite grown out hair and giggling into his mouth. Whirl's afraid of  _ this _ , of trying to be gentle and calm and so near someone else you can feel their pulse against your lips, but Tailgate pushes into him, jasmine or chamomile or something light and green and vibrant on their tongue, and rests a hand against his chest to keep him still. Whirl feels Cyclonus' knuckles rest lightly over the dip in his back and another hand drags up from his neck into his hair, and he's vibrating out of his skin with the desert heat, with the million-degree nuclear reactor that's replaced his ribcage, the faint tug of his lungs to breathe deep and inhale this moment in time completely. That thick black slide he's felt before, felt in the roots of his teeth and his eye and curled up in the back of his mouth, this time evaporates from his shoulders, a springboard push upwards that lets him lean back into Cyclonus and bring his fingers up to Tailgate's cheek. 

_ (I wanna see you put it back together.) _

Tailgate hums as he pulls away, a little one-note noise that makes Whirl bite his lip.

"See?" They say, "not so hard, was it?"

Whirl laughs. 

 

x

 

Tailgate puts music on in the morning, something soft and bouncy that plays at half-volume from the nightstand, and Whirl curls a little further into the blankets to watch them tie their hair back into box braids in front of the mirror at the other side of the room. It's not quite summer, but the ambient heat feels a little underwhelming without Tailgate sprawled out next to him. For someone so small, they take up at least half of the bed. 

Whirl rolls over and immediately pushes his nose into Cyclonus' shoulder, right where it meets his collarbone. Cyclonus grumbles but doesn't move away, just rests an arm over Whirl's waist and drags him fully into the space next to him. That kind of strength should scare him, but it doesn't - it hasn't for a while, he thinks. 

"What's on the docket today, short change?"

Tailgate smiles at him from their reflection in the mirror. They're fixing their little helix stud, and after a second they dig out another pair of silver studs shaped like stars.  

"Mostly class," they say, "but Rewind said we should come over to play DnD tonight with everyone. He's buying drinks from the coffee shop down the street, the one with the good chocolate."

"Can't believe I like you fuckin' nerds so much," Whirl mumbles, and when he feels Cyclonus huff out a laugh he pokes him in the chest.

"Don't laugh, you're the worst of them all. You made your character a sword fighting ex-bad guy, you Three Musketeers motherfucker."

"Which Musketeer would Cyclonus be?" Tailgate muses.

"Aramis," Cyclonus murmurs, dry, and when Whirl tips his head back to laugh he kisses his jaw. Whirl feels the mattress dip as Tailgate crawls back under the blankets and wraps themself like an octopus around his back. He shifts so they can curl into his side instead.

"You should play," Tailgate says, "Rewind's really good, and there's more than enough space on the ship."

Whirl hums noncommittally. "Uh-huh. Sure, pipsqueak, I'll get right on that."

"Are you going to the garage today?" Cyclonus asks as he sits up. Whirl likes this version of Cyclonus, the early morning sleep-soft and quiet version: the sports bra, the knot of hair tangled with a hair tie at the back of his head, the way he stretches to pop the stiffness out of his neck, the whole picture.

Whirl shrugs. "They don't really need me, but I'll see if I can poke around, work on something stubborn."

"Yeah, you're good at that," Tailgate says, and laughs when Whirl wraps an arm around their waist and pulls them completely on top of him. 

Whirl suddenly groans,  _ "Fuck, _ actually, I have to go see Rung. Forgot it was Monday."

Tailgate shoves at his shoulder, "You're gonna be late."

"Mm-hm, mm-hm," Whirl grumbles as he sits up, "What's he gonna do? Yell at me?" 

"No, but I might," Cyclonus says with a pointed look. His fingers catch on the gold cuff he's clasping - these are the ones Tailgate got him, the same design as his silver one, but a deep burnished gold set of two he's been wearing more and more often lately. They look good on him, but then, everything does. It's  _ Cyclonus _ .

"You won't yell at me, you like me too much," Whirl says, and as he sits up he can feel Tailgate's hand barely brush over the bottom of his spine, over his tattoo.

"I can do two things at once," Cyclonus points out.

Whirl smiles and leans to kiss him. 

(It’s kind of a routine, after all. 

It works.

It's nice.)

 

x

 

(Springer had done the one lower on his back.

It wasn't that he didn't like Roadbuster's work - the numerals on his arm were vivid black and perfectly spaced, meticulously inked in a way that looked incredible but hurt like a  _ bitch _ . No, Whirl just didn't trust the thought of him taking a needle that far down his skin, where he couldn't see him. Springer had too much earnest do-gooder in him, sometimes, but times like this it was something Whirl could almost respect, and it was usually something he could trust.

Tailgate had brushed their fingers against the two bands of black on his bicep, the way Brainstorm had done what felt like years ago - Cyclonus had looked at them curiously when he'd dragged the jacket Whirl was wearing off, but hadn't touched them. They hadn't said anything. Whirl almost forgets, sometimes, about the one on his back, but he'd taken his shirt off ages ago and when he'd sat up to straddle Cyclonus' lap he'd heard Tailgate inhale a little too sharply. Their hands were warm, as always, the little furnace, but it still made Whirl jump. 

"Who did this one?"

Whirl leaned forward and felt arms wrap automatically around his waist. Cyclonus' eyes moved from the top of his boxers around to the edge of his ribcage, and over his shoulder to meet Tailgate's. 

"Friend from a long time ago, took  _ for _ -fucking- _ ever." _

"It's pretty," Tailgate said softly, and the fingers trailing over the ink turned upward and dragged over his spine. 

Whirl remembers showing Springer the design - Roadbuster had drawn it, but Whirl wanted Springer to actually mark it into him. It seemed important, at the time.

Interwoven clock gears, starting at the lowest point of his spine and working upward, dozens of little perfect mechanisms interlocked into a single system, spilled all over his back, until it hit the back of his hips. Springer had done it, of course, but the look on his face when Whirl had shown him what he wanted had almost made him want to laugh. It had hurt for weeks, thousands of little pinpricks, over and over, making something perfect. And it was, Whirl had made sure of that - it was a perfect system. If they were real gears, they would've turned in mechanized fluidity.

Whirl bit down on Cyclonus' neck as he felt Tailgate kiss the largest gear at the very center, the one that says  _ WRECK + RULE _ in fuck-off blue .

"Pretty," they'd repeated.

Whirl had shivered.)

 

x

 

"Well, doc, another day, another patient, huh?"

Rung smiles. He's working on a slat of a new ship, this one slate blue and varnished in a shiny, even layer. 

"Hello, Whirl. How are you?"

"Oh,  _ peachy," _ Whirl says, throwing himself down on the couch and kicking his boots onto the arm rest, "Gonna have to rob you of half an hour of me-time, doc, I'm going to the garage at noon."

Rung raises his eyebrows behind his glasses - Whirl wonders if he'll ever get another pair, or if he even has a second pair. With frames like that, it's not like you need backups, he figures.

"Things still going well? I thought you might be bored of a job that doesn't technically pay."

Whirl waves a hand. "They let me mess with their shit, I don't care if they pay me in fuckin' company credit. If I could I'd just log some more hours there and take my diploma next month."

Rung smiles gently - he'd been doing that more often. It's nice, Whirl thinks, that people actually  _ want  _ to smile at him. Been a while since that's been true. Been forever, maybe.

"I'm proud of you. You've been making some incredible progress the past few months."

"Aw, doc, you say the nicest things," Whirl drawls, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. Finally got those little cracks repaired, he notices. 

"I'm being serious - I hope you realize how much work you've done. You're committed to this, and you've done some excellent work, but the road to getting here was difficult, and I want you to know that that hasn't gone unnoticed. You're graduating next year with a certificate that's all yours, from your own hard work."

_ "Alright, alright, _ I get it - I'm a reformed man, Jesus. The praise is chafing, doc, y'know that?"

"I'm aware," Rung says drily, and sets aside the next piece of his ship to fiddle with one of the mast clasps.

"What would you like to talk about, then?"

"Well," Whirl says, and sits forward, "Seems like every fucking person I know wants me to play dungeons and dragons with them. Got any way to psychoanalyze that?"

 

x

 

Brainstorm is sitting on Chromedome's bed and kicking their legs when Whirl walks in with Cyclonus and Tailgate. They're chugging a coffee about the size of their head - and Whirl uses the word  _ coffee  _ loosely, since it's about the color of oatmeal and the smell of caramel and whipped cream staggers him from the fucking doorway.

"You ever gonna develop taste buds?" Whirl asks, wrinkling his nose.

"Are you ever gonna stop pretending that drinking black coffee makes you look cool?" Brainstorm bites out, taking an obnoxiously loud sip. 

"Coffee's gross," Tailgate says, and Cyclonus snorts.

"At least someone here has taste," Rewind says from where he's sitting on the floor, laptop on his lap, using the space next to his touchpad like a coaster for a dark orange tea.

"Says the  _ dungeon master,"  _ Whirl says, making the air quotes drip. 

"Are all of you done? Feel better now?" Chromedome asks. Nautica laughs from where she's sitting next to Brainstorm. On the floor below her, Skids tosses a hacky sack four feet into the air and catches it easily, actually honest-to-god snickering at the rest of them. Swerve catches the hacky sack on the next throw to spite him.

"Alright! We're starting now, DM says so," Rewind says. Whirl sits on Brainstorm's other side, and lets his legs dangle so Tailgate can lean back against them. Cyclonus sits near Chromedome in the other desk chair, notepad open on his lap.

_ (It’s an inherently violent act, isn’t it? Aggressive, life. Forced onto the world, onto other people who pay witness, by one person.  _

_ Whirl’s always been good at that.) _

"We left off with the  _ Lost Light  _ encountering its copy in the deepest, emptiest sector of space. There's no one answering your hails on the other end, so a boarding party's been arranged. Skids, Brainstorm, and Nautica, you're investigating what's left of the seemingly abandoned labs when _ suddenly - " _

 

x

 

 

_ end. _


End file.
